Online Learning in Tertiary Level Education in the Philippines during the Pandemic: Challenges, Coping, Lessons Learned and Students’ Perceptions of Online Learning and Teacher and Student Talk

Abstract

Grounded in Lazarus & Folkman’s (1984) stress and coping theory, and Garrison, Anderson, & Archer’s (2000) Community of Inquiry (CoI) Theory, this study investigates how students cope with the challenges confronting their online learning and lessons they have learned from their experiences. The study involved google survey with 910 college students from various tertiary level programs of a state university in the Philippines such as teacher education, arts and humanities, sciences, business and accountancy, hospitality and tourism management and engineering and architecture responded. About twenty eight percent of the respondents are male while the roughly 72 percent are female. Data from the survey were thematized for similarity then tabulated. A google link was shared with the students who were given the freedom to decide whether or not to respond to the survey or not.  Findings revealed the following: (1) lack of connectivity or lack of money to avail data load, difficulty of courses caused by excessive work assignments and inability of teachers to empathize are the foremost challenges encountered by college students; (2) to cope with the challenges, students employed socio-emotional coping, problem focused coping and spiritual coping; (3) among the most important learnings of the college students both in life and academe during the pandemic are adapting to the online classes, taking initiatives to learn on their own ways to cope with the new normal situation, balancing  between time management towards schoolwork and household chores, valuing education and keeping determination, discipline and positivity strong; and (4) A greater number of responses indicates that students felt that they are not given more chances to express their ideas and interacts with their classmates and that they feel most of the time is spent in teacher’s lectures. A smaller number though believe that learners ideas were also express through online class. This study reveals the extreme effect of lockdown on education. The unhappiness and stresses of having to cope with unreasonable tasks deadlines, the difficulty of interpreting modules with little help from teachers, the extremely poor connection and the deprivation in online learning experienced by majority of students in developing countries like the Philippines, could leave our students not just the psychological pain of not having to learn fully the discipline and the practice of their supposed profession but the anxiety for the future where they, who are already professionals yet devoid of the significant knowledge, skills and values they could have possessed had this pandemic not occur in our midst might find themselves unable to immediately deliver and meet the world’s expectations. This study offers relevant recommendations to improve the online learning practice.