Impact of Emergency Remote Education in the 2021 COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case of Higher Education Students in the Department of Mechanical Engineering

The higher education in Taiwan was forced to begin an unprecedented large-scale distance teaching emergently due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2021. This research accordingly intended to realize what the students had been experienced and the mechanical engineering at a private university of technology was investigated. There are five aspects surveyed and quantitatively their satisfying order from high to low is the following- learning resources, synchronous distance teaching, final assessment, learning effectiveness, and school equipment. Next, the qualitative data shows that most students embraced freedom and liberation at the beginning of the sudden implementation of the six-week emergency distance education, and soon discovered that the pressure of learning had become greater. Reasons include easy distraction at home, increased assignments, and relatively difficult online communication, etc. In summary, the participants have the highest satisfaction with "learning resources", although there are still students who complained that they can only access the visual classroom by poor facilities, like mobile phones (6% of the participants who cannot access computers/laptops for learning), old-fashioned computers, or no internet at home. It shows the limitations of unfair resources to online learning. Furthermore, the learning effect is the second-worst, showing that although the students have mastered the skills for synchronous remote education in the six weeks, most of them still prefer to return to the familiar and reliable face-to-face classroom, owing to the difficulties in communication, hardware, and software conditions. Finally, some suggestions for the college students to prepare for the uncertain future are provided based on the study conclusions.