The COVID-19 pandemic and E-learning: challenges and opportunities from the perspective of students and instructors

Abstract

The spread of COVID-19 poses a threat to humanity, as this pandemic has forced many global activities to close, including educational activities. To reduce the spread of the virus, education institutions have been forced to switch to e-learning using available educational platforms, despite the challenges facing this sudden transformation. In order to further explore the potentials challenges facing learning activities, the focus of this study is on e-learning from students' and instructor's perspectives on using and implementing e-learning systems in a public university during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study targets the society that includes students and teaching staff in the Information Technology (IT) faculty at the University of Benghazi. The descriptive-analytical approach was applied and the results were analyzed by statistical methods. Two types of questionnaires were designed and distributed, i.e., the student questionnaire and the instructor questionnaire. Four dimensions have been highlighted to reach the expected results, i.e., the extent of using e-learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, advantages, disadvantages and obstacles of implementing E-learning in the IT faculty. By analyzing the results, we achieved encouraging results that throw light on some of the issues, challenges and advantages of using e-learning systems instead of traditional education in higher education in general and during emergency periods.

Keywords: Covid-19; E-learning; Higher education; Information technology; Pandemic.

Fig. 1

A comparison of students' and teaching staff' perspectives