Female students’ view on the imposed virtual learning environment: evidence from the UK HEI

Abstract

COVID-19, the pandemic has seen an unprecedented disruption to education for all students. For female students, from both international and domestic backgrounds, who have additional responsibilities, such as childcare, disabled parents and/or relatives, who live in a single parental home, or who have added other burdens, this has been more particularly a challenging and difficult experience. International students, studying in the UK, faced further difficulties in relation to a wide range of issues, and those females who also faced the additional burdens were hit the hardest. The data for this paper were collected during the first lockdown in the UK. The sudden imposition of a lockdown in the UK also led to the need for rapid changes to be made to the learning, teaching, and assessment approaches used by the universities and other higher educational institutions (HEI) in the UK. This added more stress and anxiety to these female student groups. This paper used an online questionnaire to assess the impact of the changes on female students at the UK‟s universities. The approach takes both their qualitative and quantitative responses to identify the key issues female students faced and in learning from their experiences, allows this small piece of research to make recommendations to the universities and other relevant academic bodies, on, how to improve and how they can support these student groups during uncertain times. The recommendations closely follow those that these female students suggest themselves.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.9790/0837-2709091727

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https://uws.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/ed0b6531-de6c-4110-b849-bb35203170c8