Dissertation Title: Evaluating the Impact of Online Teaching Approaches on Student Engagement in UK Higher Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Introduction/Rationale
The closure of learning institutions as a preventive measure against the spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) has significantly impacted the learning process, well-being and functionality of education system (Code, Ralph and Forde 2020). According to Hill and Fitzgerald (2020), the instantaneous impact of COVID-19 has been lockdown and enforced closure of learning centres such as schools, colleges and universities. Even though physical closure of these institutions has not led to complete cessation of learning, teaching and assessment (LTA), most of the traditionally used methods have been suspended. In order to abide by the National Health Service (NHS) directives on social distancing (as an approach for managing COVID-19 spread), most of the UK-based universities and colleges have transitioned their learning activities into online domains (Choi et al. 2020). Nevertheless, the experience of rapid transition to online LTA within these institutions have exposed the existence of many deficiencies within the higher education sector as well as the important changes which need to be made on the college and university LTA domain.
Adoption of online LTA during COVID-19 was a forced intervention, with limited or no assessment of student perception about the approach prior to its implementation (Hill and Fitzgerald 2020). For that matter, the proposed study is focused on understanding perception of higher education students on online LTA as well as the possible impacts these approaches on their engagement and participation in learning process. COVID-19 being a contemporary global pandemic, limited research has been performed to understand its effects on quality of education. Therefore, this is an important gap that the proposed study is focused on filling. The proposed study will use a primary quantitative approach, with data for analysis to be collected from college and university students from the UK. Outcomes from this study will be used by the Department of Education and other stakeholders within the UK education sector to develop strategies for improving student engagement during online LTA.