فهرست نشریات علمی دسترسی آزاد ایران

BACKGROUND: The COVID‑19 pandemic led to the closure of crowded places such as universitiesand replaced face‑to‑face learning with virtual education. The purpose of this qualitative study wasto investigate the challenges of virtual learning from the students’ perspectives.MATERIALS AND METHODS: This qualitative descriptive study was conducted on students ofSabzevar University of Medical Sciences. Purposeful sampling was performed by semi‑structuredgroup interviews on the Internet in the WhatsApp social network. Fifty‑two nursing, midwifery,hygiene, and paramedical students were interviewed. Every interview was started by asking thequestion “what is your experience about virtual teaching?” The data were analyzed using MAXQDAsoftware version 2020. According to the steps of qualitative content analysis, content analysis wasperformed and the themes were extracted.RESULTS: Fifty‑two students were interviewed in eight group sessions. Qualitative data analysisleads to the extraction of 23 codes, 7 categories, and the 2 main themes; dissatisfaction with virtualeducation with 4 categories (lack of feedback, communication channel problems, the unpreparednessof the message receiver, and weakness in educational content) and solutions to the modification ofvirtual teaching with three categories (possibility of receiving feedback, channel improvement, andstrengthening educational content) were extracted. The highest frequency of code was related tothe dissatisfaction with the uploaded contents.CONCLUSIONS: Virtual education has created a negative experience among students for variousreasons, including the lack of distance learning infrastructure and the lack of a standard for preparingquality content. Therefore, it is necessary for the officials of the Education Development Center tosupervise the prepared contents and improve distance learning infrastructure.