Abstract—The shift to an online education paradigm has
been dramatically seen in educational systems and universities
due to COVID-19 across the world, especially in United Arab
Emirates. The emergence of COVID-19 forced educational
institutions to divert all strategies from physical to online
platforms for the safety of students, instructors and all the other
staff members. However, this is not the case in educational
institutions only because other governmental and
non-governmental institutions are affected in the same way
around the world. The objective of this research is to
understand the behavior of students due to a sudden shift
towards an online education experience in university
environment and gauge their preference either on physical or
online education system for the future. The research collected
data through an online questionnaire from 210 undergraduate
university students which further helped the researcher to draw
the discussion and conclusion. The research proves that a high
majority of students are willing to change from physical
education to an online platforms and they believe that they can
perform well by the adoption of this new platform of online
education system. The research recommendations are helpful
for the educational policy developers.
Index Terms—COVID-19, Corona, education, e-learning,
universities, UAE.
Liaqat Ali is with the Department of Information Technology, College of
Engineering and Information Technology, University of Science and
Technology of Fujairah, P.O. Box: 2202, Fujairah, United Arab Emirates
(e-mail: liaqat22@gmail.com).
Cite: Liaqat Ali, "The Shift to Online Education Paradigm due to COVID-19: A Study of Student’s Behavior in UAE Universities Environment," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 131-136, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).