A survey of students and professors during COVID-19 lockdowns reveals that e-learning satisfaction depends on entirely different things depending on which side of the screen you are on.
The rapid shift to online education during the COVID-19 pandemic was, in many ways, the largest unplanned experiment in the history of teaching. Almost overnight, universities around the world moved their entire educational offering onto digital platforms, with little time to prepare, train, or test. What that experiment produced — beyond a generation of students who became very familiar with Zoom — was a body of evidence about where online education works, where it breaks down, and for whom.
A study co-authored by a researcher at Effat University in Jeddah draws on survey data collected during that period to answer a question that is easy to ask and harder to answer well: why do some people struggle with e-learning while others do not? The research surveyed students and professors at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional in Mexico — the country's second-largest university — asking 29 questions across a five-point scale. Approximately four-fifths of respondents were students and one-fifth were professors.
Its central finding is deceptively simple: students and teachers both struggle with e-learning, but they struggle with different things, and the solutions that address one group's problems will not necessarily address the other's.
For Students, It Comes Down to Confidence
The study challenges one of the most persistent assumptions about digital education — that younger students, having grown up with technology, will adapt to online learning with relative ease. The data tells a more complicated story.
The single biggest driver of student dissatisfaction with e-learning was not platform quality or internet connectivity. It was a feeling of deficient computer skills. For students who lacked confidence in the specific e-learning tools their courses now depended on, that lack of confidence did not stay at the level of technical inconvenience. It permeated the entire learning experience. Anxiety increased. Engagement dropped. Boredom — the kind that comes not from disinterest in the subject but from a persistent feeling of being unable to navigate the environment — became a common response.
The distinction matters. General familiarity with technology does not equal readiness for e-learning. Using a smartphone or social media platform requires a different set of skills from navigating a learning management system, participating effectively in an online seminar, or troubleshooting the technical problems that online education generates daily. Many students who appeared digitally fluent from the outside were encountering those specific demands for the first time — and finding them harder than expected.
For Teachers, It Comes Down to Institutional Support
The picture for professors is different in ways that point toward a different set of solutions. Teacher satisfaction with e-learning was not primarily determined by personal technical confidence. It was determined by the level of support their institution provided for the online teaching process.
The components of that support are specific and actionable: clear instructions and defined obligations for online teaching, a long-term institutional strategy rather than improvised decisions made in response to immediate pressures, and access to specialised software where general-purpose tools are not adequate for the teaching task. Professors at institutions that had invested in these things found e-learning more manageable and more satisfying. Those left to navigate it without that backing found it significantly harder — regardless of the platform in use or their individual technical capability.
The implication is that improving the teacher experience of online education is substantially an institutional problem rather than an individual one. Asking professors to teach well online without giving them the infrastructure and policy support to do so is asking them to succeed in conditions that have not been designed for success.
What the Survey Numbers Say
Several specific findings from the data fill out the broader picture. Zoom dominated as a platform, used by 95% of all respondents — a figure that reflects both its accessibility and the limited range of alternatives that most institutions actively promoted. Roughly a quarter of respondents reported unhappiness with the e-learning tools they had access to. Overall, teachers reported higher satisfaction than students. And a low sense of community ranked among the most significant factors in student dissatisfaction — with the social texture of in-person learning gone, many students found virtual classrooms isolating in ways that affected not just their enjoyment but their motivation and sense of belonging.
Despite all of this, the study did not conclude that e-learning is fundamentally flawed. More than half of respondents agreed that technology integration in education can be genuinely beneficial, particularly when active learning strategies are embedded in the design rather than treated as optional extras. The argument is not that online education should be abandoned but that it needs to be built and delivered differently — more equitably, more deliberately, and with a clearer understanding of who it is currently failing and why.
The Fixes That Would Actually Help
The study's recommendations are directed at institutions and policymakers rather than individual students and teachers who are already managing within the constraints they have been given.
Reducing the skills gap between students when it comes to e-learning technologies is identified as foundational. When that gap exists, it produces unequal learning outcomes regardless of the quality of the teaching — a form of educational inequity that is avoidable with sufficient investment in digital skills development, internet accessibility, and ICT infrastructure. Ensuring that marginalised and underserved groups are not systematically disadvantaged by their lower starting point is a policy responsibility, not something that resolves itself through market forces or individual effort.
University e-learning policies need to be redesigned with both ambition and specificity. Better digital resources, clearer long-term strategies, and hybrid learning models that maintain educational access for students who cannot always rely on stable technology are all identified as high priorities. These are not aspirational goals for some future iteration of online education — they are the changes that the evidence says are needed now.
The researchers also identify two directions for future work. One is the question of community: whether more thoughtfully designed digital collaborative spaces could restore some of what students lose when they move out of physical classrooms. The other is contingency: what educational institutions should do when a crisis disrupts access to the technology their online teaching depends on. Offline recovery systems and continuity strategies are easy to overlook when conditions are stable. The pandemic made the cost of that oversight clear. Building those systems before they are needed is the kind of preparation that this research is making the case for.