Transitioning from Offline to Online Learning: Issues from Computing Student Perspective

Covid-19 pandemic greatly affects student daily life. Instead of physically attend classes, they need to meet the lecturer and learn the course material via online meeting platform. The transition somehow introduces some issues like the difficulty of maintaining their focus. This becomes worse for computing students given that the assessments are not limited to standard essays. They include programming and hardware-based assessments which are more difficult to complete at home as students might not have the required software or hardware. This paper reports any issues experienced by 112 computing students in terms of transitioning from offline to online learning. Our study shows that online learning forces the students to allocate more time to study and complete the assessments. Online learning also introduces other issues like higher stress level but still has a few of positive traits like spending less money to physically attend the classes. Many students argue that programming is the most difficult subject to learn in online environment. In response to the issues, some suggestions are provided for computing lecturers.