Challenges and Opportunities of Shifting to Online Education in University EFL Classes During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The outbreak of the COVID-19 revolutionized education all around the world. The urgent shift to online education (emergency remote teaching) has been very demanding for administrators, teachers, students, and anyone involved in education. Although online and blended learning has long been practiced in education, this sudden unplanned shift created a different image, especially in less technologically developed countries. Accordingly, the present case study aimed at understanding the existing challenges and opportunities of this urgent shift to online education through the perspectives of Iranian EFL university students in online General English (GE) classes. A total of 68 university students participated in the study and the data was collected through semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and students’ reflection sheets. Content analysis using Nvivo 11® was conducted for the triangulated textual data. The findings were categorized into four major groups of challenges and opportunities, including technological, psychological/affective, linguistic, and environmental/social. Overall, 16 challenges and 11 opportunities were investigated that are discussed thoroughly in the paper.