Emergency Remote Teaching in Higher Education Institutes: A Taxonomy of Challenges Faced by First-Year Mathematics Students in the Pacific Region

Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) can be defined as a shift of instructional delivery to a substitute delivery approach during a crisis. Such a shift poses several challenges for students at Higher Education Institutes. This paper presents a taxonomy of such challenges faced by first-year mathematics students in the Pacific region during the ERT dictated by the COVID-19 pandemic. First, a list of 44 challenges was assembled based on a university’s in-house monitoring report, literature review and the authors’ experiences of challenges faced by students. Next, the open card sorting technique involving 32 participants was used to classify these challenges. Open card sorting is a well-established method for discovering how people understand and categorize information. This paper employed a recently proposed algorithm to quantitatively analyze open card sorting data using the Best Merge Method, Category Validity Technique and Multidimensional Scaling. Analysis of the collected card sort data produced the initial taxonomy of challenges. Finally, the participants were asked to answer a questionnaire so that we could validate and further refine the taxonomy. The proposed taxonomy includes seven challenges: i) lack of online learning support; ii) problem with online course delivery; iii) time and workload management; iv) learning management system issues; v) lack of face-to-face interaction; vi) financial hardship; vii) internet challenge. Such a taxonomy might be particularly useful in designing and evaluating an ERT approach.