COVID-19 and its implications on students’ learning behaviour

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, the educational institutions in India suddenly switched to online mode of teaching. This new learning mode gives the flexibility to connect at any time from any place. This sudden shift has impacted the learning behaviour of students to a large extent, which is studied and analysed in this paper for a computer programming course. An online questionnaire is prepared and circulated among the students for which 158 responses were received. Based on the responses, it is found out from the analysis that 75.32% of students favour learning this course in offline mode while 48.1% favour the virtual mode. The maximum support for the classroom teaching is evident from the data which shows that 98.73% students find the teacher’s competency good in offline mode, 98.1% find teacher’s content delivery effective in offline mode and 79.75% are of the view that possibility of frequent interaction is more in offline mode, whereas 87.97%, 85.44% and 42.41% of students are congenial with the online mode in terms of same parameters. Also, 69.62% of students are comfortable with offline mode, while 55.06% with online mode. For evaluation mode and pattern of question paper, 78.5% favour online mode of evaluation with a mix of multiple-choice questions and coding questions. It is irrespective of their preference to offline mode for teaching-learning. In the end, some recommendations are proposed based on the analysis to improve the teaching-learning methodology during the time of crisis