The Health Students’ Perception of Online Education amid the Pandemic

Abstract

The recent Covid-19 pandemic has changed the lifestyles throughout the World. This study aims to investigate the health students’ perception of online education. The field of health requires practical education. Indeed, online education has a different concept. Thus, the health students’ perceptions draw attention especially during the hard time of pandemic. This quantitative study was conducted with 581 students studying a field of health in Turkey. The data from an online survey was analyzed with Kruskal Wallis and Mann-Whitney U tests. The results show that health students’ perception on online education was found to be medium. Even though some are favor of online education with some points, some see this type of learning platform not suitable for their fields. There was no significant difference between the perception of female and male students. The students’ perception differences were found statistically significant by departments, classes, watching lessons live, having technology difficulties and using different device to access to online education. These findings confirmed that the sudden shift to online education made a different experience for health students. The research concludes with suggestions to design online education for any unexpected pandemic.

Through the Lens of Virtual Students: Challenges and Opportunities

“…Female secondary students (𝑥̅ =2.579, SD=0.361) are less happy with virtual learning than males (𝑥̅ =2.447, SD=0.413). Findings are similar to those of Baytak (2022), when females claimed academic programs were not appropriate for virtual learning, due to the abrupt move to virtual learning; so they were dissatisfied with the mode and the quality of education received from virtual learning despite improvement in the grades. Females who were less satisfied with performance depended more on virtual tutors than on virtual platforms, networks, and fora (Di Malta et al, 2022).…”

New challenges in mitigating climate change: Digital teaching for the sustainable development and innovation

“…Among all sectors, the educational system is bound to be the hardest hit. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the COVID-19 outbreak has affected nearly 1.6 billion students in more than 190 countries, including students from different countries [ [10] , [11] , [12] , [13] , [14] ], different majors [ [15] , [16] , [17] , [18] ], and different stages [ [19] , [20] , [21] , [22] , [23] ]. COVID-19 has caused many challenges globally, including overall governance capacity, education level, construction capacity, and level of education informatization of a country [ 24 ].…”

“…On the one hand, the rapid change to digital education caused poor psychological satisfaction for students. On the other hand, digital teaching provides many favorable methods for education during the epidemic [ 17 ]. Due to the comprehensive development of online teaching, the advantages of digital education are also gradually presented in practice, and due to its flexibility and being spaceless, some of the phenomena such as unequal educational opportunities and the digital divide have been greatly alleviated, which gradually increased the level of online education [ 34 ].…”