E-Student in the Mozambican Context: An Analysis of Higher Education Students’ Challenges Regarding to E-learning Implementation

Abstract

Between 2020 and 2021, Mozambican higher education was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and in this scenario, the institutions resorted to the hybrid model; but e-learning in developing countries has not been successfully implemented because many of these countries have a very high digital divide, with low digital literacy and socio-economic problems actively contributing to the failure of the introduction of e-learning in higher education in Mozambique; however, higher education institutions had no choice unless migrating from conventional to e-learning; in this sense, this article aims to analyze the main challenges that students encountered in the learning process in the face of the introduction of e-Leaning, in five Mozambican higher education institutions. The methodological approach proposed in this paper was Quanti-qualitative insofar as the obtaining of the main data was through a survey of 345 students. In addition to the information collected through questionnaires. Given the above, results point to serious difficulties arising from the digital divide. The results show that online learning platforms such as Moodle, WhatsApp, Skype, Moocs, Google Meet, MS Teams and Zoom have been introduced. One of the gaps pointed out by the students was the lack of motivation for online classes, lack of ICT skills, and computer, and mobile resources with internet access, thus contributing to poor performance in the learning process; given these results, we can conclude that if higher education institutions have no urgent structural intervention, the government, parents and guardians to improve ICT access, the country could verge a digital divide.