English-major Students Storying Their Transition into E-learning: A Study of Affordances and Constraints

Online emergency distance education, precipitated due to the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, has brought with it numerous far-reaching ramifications to and transformations in the lives of a wide range of stakeholders in education, not least among them university students. This investigation reports on how seven English-major undergraduates in a local Iranian university, with experiences of both face-to-face classrooms and online learning, came to perceive the transition they had already made from one mode of learning to another. The study additionally aimed at tapping into affordances and constraints of online education as lived by the participants. Data was collected through written researcher-made narrative templates and follow-up questions raised as a result of careful perusal of the data by the researchers. The findings yielded a picture of the vagaries of the pandemic in education as one informed, in the main, by all but a seamless transition to the new e-learning mode. Furthermore, the participants pointed to infra-structural insufficiency, shortage of institutional emotional support, and their deprivation from the panorama of rich experiences offered by campus life as the constraints of the new situation. In regard to the enablements provided, a push towards developing more digital literacy and some practical considerations, such as flexibility of course delivery and its cost-effective nature, were generally rendered as being operative in the new pedagogical experience. Implications for theory, practice, and policy are finally drawn.