Literature (Choudhury and Pattnaik 2020) provides evidence of the benefits of e-learning. Historically, e-learning is recognized as an umbrella term and has been perceived as an alternative to conventional education or a complementary to the same (Basak et al. Identified as one of the many sub-forms of e-learning, it temporarily but completely replaced the conventional educational systems and structures. Furthermore, the study uses the script approach to discuss the possibilities of incorporating the perception of lived learning space and experiences in the pedagogy to enable the learners effectively adapt to the changing scenario.ĮRL gained prominence in the context of COVID-19. The present study, therefore, through a phenomenological approach, attempts to understand the phenomena of learning in Emergency Remote Learning (ERL) by locating it within the learners’ perceptions of space.
In either of the cases though this shift in learning remains a part of discussions, there is hardly any attempt to understand how the shift in space of learning impacts the experiences of learners and the process of learning. While some of the studies from various countries point towards the structural inequalities and the dangers of normalizing emergency e-learning (Gaynor and Wilson 2020), few other works explore the possibilities of such a shift on educational systems (Adedoyin and Soykan 2020 Sepulveda-Escobar and Morrison 2020). Thus the propagation of digital divide and re-establishment of existing socio-economic hierarchies were raised as the main concerns. The immediate closure of 993 universities, 39,931 Colleges, and 10,725 standalone educational institutions affected more than 320 million students in the country (Jena 2020) as only 100 institutions of higher education were allowed to start online classes from the beginning of June 2020. This shift is marred in controversies in India. While the introduction of emergency e-learning as a crisis-response measure is not relatively new in certain parts of the world (Murphy 2020), such a large-scale transition across the globe has never been documented before. The sudden closure of schools, colleges, and universities to prevent community transmission resulted in the shift to online, remote, and digital education systems across the world (Rashid and Yadav 2020). The declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic by WHO on 11th of March 2020 impacted the higher education system massively. The study concludes by discussing the possibilities of application of script approach to effectively incorporate the aspect of learning space in new pedagogies and learning models as Blended Learning (BL) and Online Learning (OL) become the new normal worldwide. The study thus establishes the centrality of space in the process of learning and points out how the lack of a familiar learning space is linked to the absence of internal scripts that considerably impact learning. Further, the script approach was applied to analyse the data and the analysis revealed an expansion of the existing internal scripts that were based on previous learning experiences of the learners.
Often the patterns of this dissonance were marked by (1) the perception of learning and learning space, (2) the lack of intimacy in learning and learning space, (3) the negotiations made for learning and the space of learning in ERL, and (4) the challenges to cope with the responsibilities of the ERL scenario. The interviews revealed that the phenomenon of ERL is shaped by dissonance informed by the absence of a familiar learning space. Online interviews were conducted with eight undergraduate and four postgraduate students of English and Cultural Studies, enrolled at a Southern Indian university, and their responses were explicated using the Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach. In doing so, the lived experiences of remote learners who were abruptly shifted to a completely online learning space due to the pandemic COVID-19 in the Indian higher education system are documented. The study focuses on how the notion of learning space is perceived and experienced by learners in the Emergency Remote Learning (ERL) scenario.
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