Engineering Students’ Readiness for Online Learning Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic: Scale Validation and Lessons Learned from a Developing Country

Abstract

The recent outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic forced education institutes to shift to an internet-based online delivery mode. This unique situation accelerates a long-standing issue of digital inequality among the students in education and warrants a concentrated study to investigate students’ readiness for learning in online environment. This study developed an instrument to meticulously measure the students’ readiness for online learning in a pandemic situation. The proposed model consists of (a) motivation, (b) self-efficacy, and (c) situational factors. The proposed model was validated with the engineering students (for pilot study N = 68 and main study N = 988) from several universities in Bangladesh. To validate the underlying relationships between the latent constructs, an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was performed followed by structural equation modelling (SEM) for the construct validity of the measurement model and to assess the model fit. The findings showed that besides motivation and self-efficacy, the situational factors describing the contextual dynamics emerging from the COVID-19 significantly influenced the student’s online readiness. We argue that digital inequality is an important factor influencing student readiness for online learning.

Keywords

• online learning readiness
• covid-19 pandemic
• bangladesh
• engineering education
• structural equation modelling
• situational factors
• digital inequality