Challenges of Online Learning During the COVID-19: What Can We Learn on Twitter?

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is an ongoing global pandemic. With schools shut down abruptly in mid-March 2020, education has changed dramatically. With the phenomenal rise of online learning, teaching is undertaken remotely and on digital platforms, making schools, teachers, parents, and students face a steep learning curve. This unplanned and rapid move to online learning with little preparation results in a poor experience for everyone involved. Thus, this study explores how people perceive that online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic is challenging. We focus on tweets in English scraped from March to April 2020 with keywords related to the COVID-19 pandemic and online learning. We applied the latent Dirichlet allocation to discover the abstract topics that occur in the data collection. We analyzed representative tweets from the qualitative perspective to explore and augment quantitative findings. Our findings reveal that most challenges identified align with previous studies. We also shed light on several critical issues, including mental health, the digital divide, and cyberbullying. Future work includes investigating these critical issues to enhance teaching and learning practices in the post-digital era.