Experiences of Undergraduates' Emergency Remote Education in Mexico

Emergency Remote Education started with the COVID-19 pandemic bringing significant changes to learners and teachers. Education was experienced by everyone in unprecedented ways that require research and understanding. This paper presents a quantitative and transactional study aimed at characterising student emergency e-learning experiences during COVID-19 lockdown and comparing them among the five undergraduate educational programmes offered by a public Mexican university. The participants were 969 undergraduate students, who were surveyed online. For data analysis, we calculated descriptive statistics and performed Kruskal-Wallis tests in SPSS25. Results showed that (1) mobile phones were the most used devices to connect to online classes; (2) Information Technology (IT) courses utilise specialised alternative platforms; (3) Connectivity and device problems, along with family reasons and sickness were the most common reasons for absence; (4) Eye strain due to continuous usage of electronic devices was a common discomfort among participants; (5) Work overload, problems to understand educational materials and lack of motivation were other common problems; (6) Students had an overall good perception of the synchronous e-learning model implementation; and (7) E-learning could be improved mostly through actions on the part of the instructor. For instance, focus on the most important topics and materials and provide students with more personalised attention.