The relationship between student attitudes towards using virtual education and their satisfaction during the COVID-19 pandemic

The move to new approaches to higher education has required many universities around the world to use e-learning in their courses. The present study aimed to inves- tigate the relationship between the atti-tudes of the students toward using virtual education and their satisfaction level dur-ing the Covid-19 crisis. The research meth-odology used was descriptive. A sample of 165 undergraduate students (89 technical engineering and 76 psychology students) were randomly selected at Islamic Azad University Shahre Rey in the first semes-ter of 2020-2021. Attitude and satisfac-tion level toward virtual education ques-tionnaires were used to collect data. The analyses were carried out through SPSS software (26 version), by using the Pearson correlation and t-tests on two independent samples. Findings indicated that there was a significant relationship between at-titudes toward virtual education and sat-isfaction for all participants. Therefore, it can be concluded that the more positive attitudes towards e-learning and virtual education are, the higher the satisfaction level toward virtual education is. In ad-dition, there was no difference between the attitudes and satisfaction level toward virtual education in the two target groups. A more accurate analysis of the questions showed that virtual education generat-ed more problems for technical students when it came to understanding the main concepts. While both groups believed that online examinations were more appro-priate given the pandemic circumstances, some difficulties such as internet speed and challenges while uploading the re-sponse sheets affected their attitude in a negative way. The findings also indicated that psychology students found using the internet and online platforms more chal-lenging than engineering students.