Experiences of undergraduates’ emergency remote education in Mexico

Abstract

Emergency Remote Education started with the COVID-19 pandemic bringing significant changes to learners and teachers. Education was experienced by everyone in unprecedented ways that require research and understanding. This paper presents a quantitative and transactional study aimed at characterising student emergency e-learning experiences during COVID-19 lockdown and comparing them among the five undergraduate educational programmes offered by a public Mexican university. The participants were 969 undergraduate students, who were surveyed onlinfe. For data analysis, we calculated descriptive statistics and performed Kruskal–Wallis tests in SPSS25. Results showed that 1) mobile phones were the most used devices to connect to online classes; 2) Information Technology (IT) courses utilise specialised alternative platforms; 3) Connectivity and device problems, along with family reasons and sickness were the most common reasons for absence; 4) Eyestrain due to continuous usage of electronic devices was a common discomfort among participants; 5) Work overload, problems to understand educational materials and lack of motivation were other common problems; 6) Students had an overall good perception of the synchronous e-learning model implementation and 7) E-learning could be improved mostly through actions on the part of the instructor. For instance, focus on the most important topics and materials and provide students with more personalised attention.

Keywords

• higher education
• students
• pandemic
• covid-19