COVID-19 and online learning in higher education. A case study of students from Portalegre and Beja Polytechnic Institutes

Since the early spring of 2020, Portuguese higher education institutions, as well as other education institutions around the world, have been experiencing an unprecedented massive "migration" from traditional in-class face-to-face education to online education. The massive changing models of teaching and learning brings out different perceptions from various parties. There are some advantages and disadvantages in this kind of learning model. The purpose of this study is to investigate the learners' perception on online learning in a scenario of a COVID-19 pandemic. The subject of this research are students of two Portuguese Polytechnic Institutes (Portalegre and Beja). The instrument used is an online survey questionnaire, anonymous and voluntary, sent to undergraduate engineering students of the two institutions. This study not only report that online learning is good during COVID-19 pandemic, but also spotted the light on the availability of internet access and computers or cell phones. The main conclusions show that the impact was manly negative from the learners' perception perspective, having mostly referred the workload and also the difficulty in clarifying doubts in time as major factors that had a very negative influence on their academic performance. Also, the social distancing from colleagues was mentioned as a negative aspect. Finally, most respondents expressed a clear preference for face-to-face education for the next academic year.