Students’ perspectives on the virtual teaching challenges in the COVID-19 pandemic: A qualitative study

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic led to the closure of crowded places such as universities and replaced face-to-face learning with virtual education. The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the challenges of virtual learning from the students' perspectives. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This qualitative descriptive study was conducted on students of Sabzevar University of Medical Sciences. Purposeful sampling was performed by semi-structured group interviews on the Internet in the WhatsApp social network. Fifty-two nursing, midwifery, hygiene, and paramedical students were interviewed. Every interview was started by asking the question “what is your experience about virtual teaching?” The data were analyzed using MAXQDA software version 2020. According to the steps of qualitative content analysis, content analysis was performed and the themes were extracted. RESULTS: Fifty-two students were interviewed in eight group sessions. Qualitative data analysis leads to the extraction of 23 codes, 7 categories, and the 2 main themes; dissatisfaction with virtual education with 4 categories (lack of feedback, communication channel problems, the unpreparedness of the message receiver, and weakness in educational content) and solutions to the modification of virtual teaching with three categories (possibility of receiving feedback, channel improvement, and strengthening educational content) were extracted. The highest frequency of code was related to the dissatisfaction with the uploaded contents. CONCLUSIONS: Virtual education has created a negative experience among students for various reasons, including the lack of distance learning infrastructure and the lack of a standard for preparing quality content. Therefore, it is necessary for the officials of the Education Development Center to supervise the prepared contents and improve distance learning infrastructure.