Abstract:

Under the circumstances of COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutions face dramatic and complex challenges in teaching and learning. Around 1.54 billion school and university students throughout 185 countries in Europe, Asia, North and South America were affected by COVID-19 pandemic at the end of March 2020 (Schleicher, 2020). The latest studies show that during the pandemic, educational institutions had to rethink their educational mission, needs and expectations, priorities as well as the question how they will organize and manage teaching and learning process to achieve expected learning outcomes (Reimers et al., 2020).

During the pandemic, teachers have played crucial role overcoming practical, personal, and institutional constraints to assure effective virtual education (Pyhältö et al., 2020). They had to transform their teaching contents and tools, rethink students' engagement practices, manage their expectations, address social exclusion and emotional downturn of their students. At the same time students also had the unique experience related to changed learning environment and tools. This paper aims to reveal shift of students’ attitudes and expectations on their learning due to the pandemic.

To explore students different experience the focus groups method was selected for this study. Focus groups are useful when it comes to investigating what participants think, but they excel at uncovering why participants think as they do (Morgan, 1988). Four focus groups per five participants were conducted online in one of the universities of Lithuania in June of 2021. Undergraduate (two groups) and postgraduate (two groups) students from social sciences (two groups) and Chemistry and Electronics engineering (two groups) were explored. First year students were excluded from the focus groups, as they had no previous experience in face-to-face learning in university context.

The main findings of the study: students’ new study habits were developed. Students stressed the importance of “why” in all the activities they were asked to participate in during online learning – especially passively listening to teachers. Distractions were more of an issue than in face-to-face learning. Students highlighted they started multitasking and mostly stopped making notes as all the material became available online.

Though most students enjoyed the freedom and flexibility online studies provided, they would prefer at least some of the activities face to face. Mixed learning method is wanted the most for the future. Students would prefer theoretical lectures online and tutorials as face-to-face activities.

Students emphasize the importance of good relations with teachers which influence the good learning atmosphere. Those relationships which were not formed before the pandemic, were mostly formal and based mostly on the completion of the compulsory tasks only. Mentoring and supervising relationships became even more important during the pandemic.

Similar tendencies were evident regarding the peer-to-peer relationships – peers were important for motivation and as a support in completing the more complex tasks, but in cases where these relationships were not formed before, they were not developed during the online learning period.

Keywords:

Students, online learning, COVID-19, teaching, pandemic learning.