Implications of the Digital Divide for the Learning Process During the COVID-19 Crisis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis, higher education institutions organized for online learning. The aim of the present study was to examine the implications of online learning for students with limited access to information and communication technology (ICT), content infrastructures, and digital environments, assuming that such limited access may impair their ongoing learning process when instruction moves online, and cause situations of stress and frustration, as well as a desire to drop out of school. The mixed-method study involved 639 students studying at institutions of higher education in Israel, who completed a questionnaire containing open and closed questions. The findings show that 13% of participants reported that they had limited access, difficulties, and malfunctions resulting from a weak connection to the Internet, and numerous disconnects, especially during synchronous lectures. They reported having difficulties downloading content from the Internet and uploading materials. It has been shown that limited access to the Internet has implications for the learning process, motivation, self-efficacy, as well as for feelings and emotions. It is liable to lead to the widening or the creation of gaps between students who have full and those who have limited access to the Internet. The findings show that little use is made of forums (10%). A more extensive use of the forums is recommended in courses where students have limited access to the Internet, to create a supportive learning community.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".