Student Teachers’ Experiences of Online Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Challenges and Opportunities

With the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, universities were obliged to shift from in-person to online education to continue educational activities. This mandatory migration from face-to-face to online structures has been accompanied by challenges and opportunities. Our study found that challenges of online education from the perspective of student teachers included challenges related to the LMS (high cost of the internet, lack of adequate network coverage in rural areas, weak servers), faculty (teachers weakness in online teaching, refusing to use all of the LMS facilities, a large amount of assignments), and student (family environment, hardware equipment, enhancing cheating motivation, unfair competition, vision problems). In addition, according to student teachers, opportunities for online education included flipped teaching, evaluation with a feed-forward approach, mastery learning, strengthened self-confidence in shy learners, and easy access to faculty members. Overall, the results indicate that online education, despite all the challenges, provides opportunities which can be effective if used appropriately.