Title Investigating the Critical Nature of HE Emergency Remote Learning Networks During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

In 2020, the world experienced a historical community lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The unprecedented spread of this highly infectious disease imposed the closure of educational institutions to contain transmission of the virus. In response, universities transitioned immediately into emergency (online) remote learning (ERL) pedagogies to ensure continued education [1, 2]. This rapid shift into ERL created a new educational ecosystem [3] different from the widely published eLearning pedagogies experienced by higher education (HE) before the pandemic. This article describes a research study in the Saudi Arabia HE sector to uncover students’ learning networks formed in such a chaotic environment by examining how interactions between the different instructional strategies contributed to student learning. The research design employed a mixed-methods approach; a qualitative study explored the formation of learning networks through the actor-network theory (ANT), providing the ERL feedback as content for an online questionnaire; a five-level Likert agreement scale was used to prepare the data for the quantitative study. A Rasch measurement theory (RMT) model [4] was used to analyse the questionnaire. Overall results identified influencing learning actors, while conclusions from the Rasch analysis identified gender performance differences.