Prediction of Student Satisfaction on Online Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic - A Case Study on Sri Lankan Universities

• Main Authors: Prasanth, Senthan, Banujan, Kuhaneswaran, Kumara, Btgs, Rupasingha, Hiruni
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: ANN; Artificial neural networks; Computer aided instruction; COVID- 19; E-Learning; Education; Electronic learning; Machine Learning; Pandemics; Support vector machines; SVM
• ISSN: 2472-7598
• DOI: 10.1109/ICter53630.2021.9774807

With the sudden upsurge of the Corona Virus (COVID -19) epidemic, higher education institutions around the globe have been engaging in untiring efforts to provide continuous learning opportunities for the students and to safeguard their welfare. This research is done to investigate the true experiences of university students in Sri Lanka using e-learning facilities throughout this period of the epidemic situation and forecast the adaption of e-learning in the universities after this epidemic situation. For this purpose, an online survey was designed and a formal questionnaire was circulated. In the end, after a thorough survey, a satisfactory result was obtained. Out of the 909 responses, 189 were not interested in involving in the e-learning process in the future whereas 460 were identified as satisfied with the adaption of e-learning. In addition, the rest of the 260 was satisfied with both the cases. Furthermore, the dataset fed into selected supervised machine learning techniques like Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to develop the prediction model on forecasting the likelihood of students with the adaption of the method of e-learning in the days to come. As per the results obtained, ANN outperformed against SVM and resulted in an accuracy of 76.19%. Immense inconveniences were experienced in the course of the students' academic activities, because of the sudden upsurge of the pandemic. They are namely inaccessibility of technological devices, poor connectivity of the internet, and unsuitable surroundings for learning. This attempt also pinpoints the characteristics of the prevailing technological procedures in the making of distance learning theory. It was concluded that additional funding and feasible plans would be necessitated for the enhancement of an effective teaching-learning process towards the aforesaid method of the educational framework all over the country.