BARRIERS OF ONLINE LEARNING: STUDENTS' PERCEPTIONS AND EXPERIENCES IN THE CONTEXT OF COVID-19 PANDEMIC

The COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching effects and consequences particularly on education. Universities including in the Philippines had to close their campuses down in the spring of 2020 and shift all their academic programs online. Moreover, the implementation of online learning as an alternative way of learning posed different risks, problems, and challenges to both the teachers and students. This study seeks to figure out the students' perceptions and experiences of the use of online learning in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines. This uses a qualitative research approach incorporating purposive and convenience sampling to gather data from the respondents. Following the TIPEC framework and Transactional Distance Theory, the results show that the students struggled in an online learning setup and the most dominant barrier experienced by the students is the bandwidth and connectivity issue under the Technology category with the technology ownership under the Technology category still as the least experienced barrier and that barriers increases the transactional distance between learners and teachers. Since the study is limited to a sample size only, further studies are recommended to further discuss the issue of the study, and some suggestions were presented to address online learning concerns.