“Why are These Problems Still Unresolved?” Those Pending Problems, and Neglected Contradictions in Online Classroom in the Post-COVID-19 Era

3.1.1.1 Teachers’ Teaching

Communication and interaction are encountered by most teachers in the online classroom. Nearly one-third of teachers in the research said it was difficult to maintain normal interaction and communication with students.

P-24-1-6: “Teaching in an online classroom is very difficult. The frequency of communication between me and my students has greatly decreased because I can’t see my students physically.”

P-8-1-2: “Because you can’t see students at all, many times your tentative communication can’t be answered, and students are not willing to take the initiative to communicate with you.”

This problem was mentioned long before the epidemic; that is, teachers cannot interact well with students in online courses, just as what has been verified in many studies before the epidemic (Zhao & Yi, 2018). It is a long-term and urgent problem that needs to be solved. In fact, there is a lot of research on the decline of interaction in the online classroom, which has been discussed earlier (e.g., Blaine, 2019; Li, 2020, 2021; Rovai & Downey, 2010). This problem has a long history, but the development of the online classroom has not solved this problem well in the post-COVID-19 era.

The reason why the lack of good assessment is reported by some teachers is as same as that of the above phenomena – in the online class environment, teachers lack good methods of interaction with students, which leads to the failure of past assessment methods.

P-6-1-1: “In the face-to-face classroom, we can take a traditional examination, but in the online classroom, we can’t.”

P-5-1-9: “The third problem is, the validity of their assessment.”

At the same time, the online assessment is unreasonable, and the results may be untrue. Some students believe that the online examination is less fair and cannot replace the traditional final examination (Yang, 2021). If the above problems are not effectively solved, it will affect each student’s learning state and teachers’ understanding of students.

In addition, inappropriate and insufficient learning content is also a problem worthy of vigilance. These two problems that the content of online courses is not rich have lasted for a very long time. Although these two questions were not mentioned when researchers asked teachers what problems they encountered in the online classroom, they were frequently mentioned when researchers asked teachers for advice. Therefore, it can be seen that these two problems also have a prominent impact. In fact, this problem has been pointed out by many studies, especially early studies. Bequiri, Chase, and Bishka (2009) found that the appropriateness of the online course would affect student satisfaction, which deserved attention. In the early days, especially from 2000 to 2010, the Internet was just popularized in schools. Teachers usually introduced the content of traditional face-to-face courses directly into online teaching, which led to a mismatch between the curriculum and the content. The origin of this point is well known, but it is still not well solved. The school still orders the teachers to adopt unreasonable course contents instead of elaborately designed courses according to the characteristics of online.

3.1.1.2 Student’s Learning

In students’ learning, students’ attention is very difficult to be caught by teachers. This problem is very prominent in the online classroom, not only because the sense of distance makes it difficult for students to feel the supervision of others, thus distracting their attention, but also because the above-mentioned students have mastered the right not to let teachers see them, and they have taken the initiative. Lin and Chen (2012) found in the past that this phenomenon exists for a long time and can lead to a significant dependence on students’ initiative for learning in online classrooms. At the same time, their lack of identification and motivation is also one of the reasons for attention problems.

P-1-1-19: “Their attention has been difficult to focus on the classroom, and I have to use a lot of activities to attract their attention.”

P-10-1-3: “They can’t concentrate, especially when they turn off the camera, which happens widely.”

This verifies a significant problem reported by previous research: a moderate degree of attention loss in college students’ home online learning (Chen & Long, 2020).

P-1-3-3: “You know that many times student’s learning materials are lacking. If the school does not provide support, most of the time our teachers can only do slides. This is not a problem, but it is far from enough for a class, for student’s learning. I mean, it’s not as rich as face-to-face classes.”

This paragraph is highly similar to the results of a previous study, indicating that more than 10 years have passed and this issue has not been resolved in any way. Jiang and Zhang (2011) found that most courses are based on a simple presentation of text teaching materials or teacher lecture notes, without setting up simulated real learning situations for learners, lacking practical problems that learners can solve, and unable to engage in group collaboration, role-playing, discussion, and questioning. problem-solving, etc.

In online classrooms, there are too few learning materials we can provide to students. Many times, it’s just slides and some recommended books that don’t provide them with more experiences, such as observation and visits. This also leads to confusion among many students during the learning process. For example, Huang (2013) found that this problem in classroom may cause students to lose direction and feel confused.

All these above have led to the decline of students’ learning quality, which is more serious in the countryside. The teachers described and confirmed this problem from many aspects.

P-10-1-2: “This will make their time for learning more less, I think. Yes, that is true.”

It is worth noting that the differences brought by regional and economic development, to some extent, affect the effect of the online classroom. A previous study by Xiao, Lin, and Chen (2020) shows that the quality of online teaching in rural areas, especially in economically underdeveloped areas, is significantly worse than that in urban areas.

Overall, students’ learning in online classes has been a long-standing issue, especially in the K12 stage of online classroom research. They mainly involve parents and teachers to analyze relevant issues from multiple perspectives. For example, Kuang (2019) found that from the perspectives of teachers and parents, students’ learning in online classrooms is inherently limited, with many drawbacks that software and technology cannot solve.

3.1.1.3 Classroom Discipline and Management

Students’ classroom discipline is also very prominent. Classroom discipline is the key to maintaining the normal operation of the classroom. If teachers can only see students, but cannot interact with them in a physical sense, this kind of classroom discipline is difficult to maintain. The field of view brought by the camera is limited, which means that there is a monitoring blind area. In this situation, online classrooms may lead to serious management issues, especially in the early days when network speeds were slower and device functionality was worse (Wang, 2005). Anyway, according to current research, although this issue has improved due to technological advancements, it still exists universally.

P-22-1-4: “In the online classroom or theonline teaching, it’s very hard because I can only see them but there are no physical interactions with them.”

P-34-1-14: “Because you cannot see them. Most of them, maybe, are not listening but doing something else on the Internet, because we cannot see what they’re doing”;

Some teachers said that when they were giving a lecture, sometimes they could hear students typing with the keyboard. They didn’t distinguish whether they were chatting with friends or taking notes. This shows two situations: one is that the current classroom discipline is very poor, and the other is that it is difficult for teachers to take the initiative in controlling classroom discipline.

Yue and He conducted a detailed analysis of this issue in 2008, believing that classroom discipline can be divided into teacher-facilitated discipline, group-facilitated discipline, task-facilitated discipline, and student self-facilitated discipline. Due to the fact that online classes are conducted in an online environment, the factors that affect these probabilities are more complex, leading to many problems. It is precisely the weakening of these four aspects that have been influenced by online classrooms, which has brought great management pressure to teachers.

3.1.1.4 Students’ Psychology

Many teachers have the same problem in stimulating students’ learning motivation. Students’ learning motivation refers to those impetuses that can stimulate or maintain students’ learning behavior which needs a lot of ways to stimulate. Obviously, it is more difficult for teachers to do this in the online classroom.

P-2-1-27: “It’s difficult for me to stimulate their learning motivationbecause we don’t meet each other face to face.”

Attention and motivation are important parts of psychology. At the same time, there are also students’ psychological problems.

P-19-1-1: “Some are suffering from depression, and mental problem.”

In this study, the number of teachers who reported that students had various degrees of psychological problems is numerous, which is a problem worthy of great attention. According to the results of this study, this problem has not been well solved in the post-COVID-19 era.

From many previous studies, it can be seen that there are many factors that can affect students’ psychology in online classrooms, leading to a series of psychological problems (Sun, Zhao, Li, Chi, & Mu, 2015). Therefore, psychological issues have always been worth worrying about. From the interview, it appears that many teachers are not very satisfied with the psychological state of students in online classes and are full of concerns.

P-32-1-22: “I have always felt that students have different psychological problems. Some students are more withdrawn, possibly due to a long-term lack of communication, while others become strange, which is clearly not the case when they are in face-to-face classes or going out for activities. I find it easier for them to give up, I mean when faced with difficulties.”

This participant provided a very detailed description of this issue. In fact, this issue is very complex. In previous studies, Liu and Hu (2014) have found that the psychological state is closely related to other factors in many online courses, and in any case, it deserves further attention from schools and teachers.

3.1.2.1 Hardware and Equipment

More than half of the teachers reported the Internet problem. Frequent disconnection or slow network speed would seriously interfere with the normal progress of teaching. And they thought this issue happened on “both sides.”

P-27-1-X: “Sometimes maybe the students or teachers also don’t have a good internet connection, which is a challenge.”

They believed that this problem required the intervention and solution of the government because this was a regional problem.

P-28-1-29: “There are issues or maybe some problems that I’m countering through my state.”

Many studies call for the establishment of a more stable and high-quality Internet during the epidemic because a stable network is the basis of all online classrooms, which is the most concerned problem of teachers and students (Ma, Wu, Zhou, & He, 2020). In fact, Wu and Turner (2006) found that network bandwidth speed has a significant impact on students’ interaction in online classrooms. When the network bandwidth is slow, student interaction will be greatly reduced. This ultimately had an impact on learning outcomes. Bandwidth issues or network issues have always been a topic of concern for teachers in online classrooms (Caris, Ferguson, & Gordon, 2002) and have not changed since 2002–2023.

The lack of teaching tools, environment, and equipment that are suitable for online courses is also a serious problem. It is worth noting that these problems are often closely related to Internet problems. Therefore, during coding, researchers chose to combine the views expressed by some teachers when they mentioned this problem.

P-25-1-69: “But in terms of the technical issue or the software that we use, yeah, that could be also a problem.”

P-32-1-19: “Our main problem is, the gadget that is the only thing we really need to help to improve the quality of online classroom teaching in my place.”

Many teachers still apply the teaching tools and equipment used in the face-to-face classroom, and the selection and design of the teaching environment are also casual. However, the unsatisfactory learning environment is the most prominent problem faced by college students’ E-learning (Hu & Liu, 2020).

3.1.2.2 School Management

The old and rigid management system is also shaky under the long-term online class, which shows the incorrect management of schools. The instability of teachers caused by various reasons has seriously impacted the quality of online classes. Some schools change teachers very frequently. Teachers and students are not familiar with each other, which damages the teaching effect to a certain extent.

P-36-1-X: “They often change teachers, every now and then there is always this introduction. I think, it is not advisable.”

Another important issue is a serious lack of teacher training. Many teachers have not received training at all, which leads them to neither understand students nor adopt teaching methods and contents suitable for an online class environment. Ray (2009) found that, although researchers tout the importance of training prior to teaching online, this study found that a large percentage of instructors are not receiving any training in pedagogy or technology prior to instructing their first online course. Researchers have been emphasizing this issue, but it has never been resolved.

P-30-1-35: “We have less training and don’t know how to deliver high-quality education in this situation.”

3.1.2.3 Education Equity and Privacy Protection

The lack of educational equity and privacy protection is the embodiment of the insufficient performance of school responsibilities. Some students do not have Internet or learning equipment because of family economic conditions or the backward regional economy, which makes them unable to obtain opportunities of online learning.

P-17-1-18: “We don’t have justice at this one, because we know that not all of the children have the capacity to attend this.”

This situation is also shown in the level of teachers’ skills. For example, urban teachers’ mastery of information technology is significantly higher than that of rural school teachers (Xiao et al., 2020). All these damage the equity of education.

At the same time, the ease of access and dissemination of video and text materials in online classes also greatly increases the risk of privacy disclosure. This is a problem that has not been mentioned in many previous studies. In fact, privacy issues deserve our attention, because they not only concern the personal safety of students and teachers but also affect the validity of the entire online classroom. A report by NPE on online learning in 2018 sparked high attention from the internet to this privacy issue. At present, it seems that there has not been a good solution, and over time, the attention has decreased, and the number of teachers who are aware of this problem is gradually decreasing.

P-33-1-1: “Most of the time we are not sure about our privacy.”

3.1.2.4 Family Interference

As mentioned above, parents replace peers and teachers and become the people who accompany students for the longest time. Therefore, the impact of parents’ incorrect behavior on students is gradually increasing.

P-36-1-19: “Parents should be with them, but they should not interfere.”

Some parents also have unsuitable expectations of the current education.

P-24-1-29: “Some parents expect too much from teachers and students.”

These reflect that the school does not communicate well with parents. According to previous studies, the negative impact of parents on students’ online learning is a widespread problem. During the epidemic, most university students feel that their parents cannot understand them, and it is difficult to communicate with their parents (Qi, 2020).

In fact, the concept of “family interference” is complex. Researchers find that it includes two situations: one is that the family members mentioned above should support students’ learning and behave properly for students’ learning, such as reasonable expectation and encouragement. The other means that family members should avoid making interference by doing some of their inadvertent behaviors when students are learning online. This was discussed in detail by Adedoyin and Soykan (2020), who discovered that the unexpected appearance or interruption of family members, friends, and pets may cause disruption or diversion of online learning participants’ attention during the online teaching and learning process

3.2.2.1 Teaching Preparation

In strengthening teachers’ lesson preparation, two parts need special attention: First, teachers and schools should update or adjust the current teaching materials. Many have not made special optimizations for the online class environment in the past 2 years.

P-28-2-3: “Most of the time I need some teaching materials.Because we don’t just focus on textbooks, of course. There are some certain materials that we also need to use in our teaching.”

Second, the teaching and learning environment should be specially designed. The atmosphere brought by this environment may greatly affect the learning state.

P-35-2-6: “You should teach in the classroom, the environment should be suitable and friendly for online. “

3.2.2.2 Interaction in Teaching and Learning

Teachers should strengthen communication and interaction with students and pay attention to guiding students to share, which should be fully considered not only in classroom teaching but also in curriculum design and assessment.

P-19-2-8: “I think communication is very important. You can either talk to them privately or ask them some questions. You can also ask suggestions from them. So you can ask them what should I do in class that will make you motivated to learn.”

The mutual understanding brought by this communication can make all kinds of teaching and courses more successful in design and implementation. Problem-oriented teaching and learning have been proven to be very effective by some current participants. At the same time, giving enough feedback can greatly improve the teaching and learning effect in the current online classroom.

3.2.2.3 Attention and Motivation

In classroom teaching, teachers should try to attract students’ attention through various ways, such as vivid teaching aids, real objects, vivid and interesting videos, and cards.

P-7-2-1: “Since the problem is about getting their attention, so you really need to take some effort, you know, to make the class livelier so that you will get their attention fully.”

Simple lectures or slide statements are more likely to make students bored in online classes than in face-to-face classrooms. Therefore, teachers should use a variety of methods to try to get students’ attention. At the same time, giving praise and avoiding punishment can effectively stimulate students’ learning motivation. That encouragement is an important behavior of teachers is mentioned directly or indirectly by almost all participants, which is of great value to students in the online classroom.

P-49-2-X: “I kind of need to encourage them or to motivate them, although sometimes their cameras are closed. But I still need to encourage them.”

3.2.2.4 Student Assessment

In the online classroom, because students cannot be under the reasonable supervision and observation of teachers and schools, most of the traditional assessment methods may face the risk of failure. Therefore, the urgent task of schools and teachers is to explore and develop new assessment methods, which can help teachers understand the situation of students and adjust their teaching work.

P-8-2-X: “In online teaching, it is very important to assess, have a new way to assess.”

In addition to new assessment methods, the understanding of students is also very important, because students may also face various difficulties in e-learning, which are the second factor that must be considered in the assessment.

3.2.2.5 Learning Content

The course content and teaching method should adapt to the network classroom. As mentioned earlier, many teachers and schools are still using the curriculum and teaching methods used in the past face-to-face classroom, which has caused some problems and must be changed. Thus, the learning difficulty should be appropriately adjusted. In the online class environment, students lack face-to-face guidance from teachers. If the learning difficulty is high, it is easy to badly weaken students’ learning motivation, resulting in weariness. According to Zhang (2014)’s research on students’ writing learning, the higher the complexity and difficulty of learning tasks, the greater the pressure on students, and the greater the increase in self-confidence and motivation. For example, he found that when students could not find appropriate words to express their ideas, they would be tired of writing. Rich classroom activities, compared with boring knowledge, can alleviate the above problems.

P-9-2-19:“You have to know the students’ interests and have any some activities that are suitable for online. “

3.3.2.1 Economic Level and Educational Equity

China is still a developing country with a per capita GDP of only $12551 (Xiaoxiang Post, 2022), just above the world average. China’s overall economic level is not high and the development of various regions is uneven, which is reflected in the income of residents. Urban residents earned $7102 in 2021, whereas rural residents earned only $2835 in 2021 (Read Chuang, 2022), which was less than 40% of the former. This is a very striking difference, which means that there is a huge inequality in income between urban and rural areas, which also directly affects the balance of educational resources between the two different regions. A previous study by Xiao et al. (2020) showed that the quality of online teaching in rural areas, especially in economically underdeveloped areas, was significantly worse than that in urban areas. The economic level of the Philippines is lower than that of China, and their per capita GDP is about one-third of that of China, facing similar problems. Regional differences in the Philippines have reached the same level. According to the city's asset value in 2022 (China News, 2022), Quezon City, the richest city, was more than six times as rich as Manila, the third-tier city. The former is 415 billion pesos, while the latter is only 65 billion pesos. If ranked by provinces, the gap will be even larger. The total asset value of Cebu is 215 billion pesos, while Rizal is only 30.6 billion pesos. This reflects the economic imbalance between different regions, which also affects education to a certain extent.

The situations of China and the Philippines represent the higher and middle levels of developing countries in Asia respectively. Especially, they represent the plight of most countries in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly developing countries. While adequate economic support cannot be provided in education, there is an imbalance in educational development between regions, which greatly damages the issue of educational equity. This problem is particularly acute in rural areas and underdeveloped areas.

3.3.2.2 The Interaction Problem has Not been Resolved Well

At the beginning of this article, the researchers analyzed the deficiencies of online classroom interaction. According to Zhao et al. (2022), the severe problems in the interaction of the online classroom are poor effectiveness, low motivation, and many technical issues. These issues are derived from the essential characteristics of the online classroom itself teachers and students can’t face each other physically. As long as the online classroom is used, whether it is synchronous or asynchronous, whether it is one-to-one or one-to-many, this problem cannot be circumvented. As mentioned earlier, due to the focus on the entire education sector, the online classroom has received a lot of economic and policy support from 2020 to 2021, but the interaction problem has not been well solved in practice.

In various research, technology and teaching, which are two different research routes, are still the main solutions to improve the interaction of online classes. However, they have their own problems: (1) Technology – Although some developed areas have tried to introduce some new technologies to support online classroom teaching experimentally, they are all used in individual schools and short-term applications, or have not been used in a long-term or large-scale way; (2) Teaching – It appears that educators are fully aware of the elements that contributed to the decrease in teaching interaction effectiveness. But they also lack an effective strategy. For example, Zhao et al. (2022) found that students have the right to let teachers not see them, which means that the interaction between teachers and students has really changed. This is also the weakening of teachers’ power, which will change the interaction in the online classroom (Li, 2020). In this case, it is difficult for teachers to dominate teaching, so the efficiency of teaching begins to decline. The solution to this issue may lie in reform and continued advancement of teaching methods.

3.3.2.3 Some Problems are Contradictory with Each Other

From the above results, we can find some problems are contradictory with each other: to solve one of them means that it will affect or aggravate the severity of the other, which makes it difficult to solve these problems alone.

For example, the privacy and interaction issues mentioned above. If you want to solve interaction, the best solution is to further introduce various new technologies. These new technologies ensure normal interaction by increasing the degree of teachers’ access to information and monitoring students. However, this means that privacy will be further undermined.

As we said above, this is a contradiction, which means that no matter what we do, we cannot improve interaction and protect students’ privacy at the same time. In fact, this problem is also true for teachers. The more students want to see teachers, the less privacy teachers have. The researchers find that this problem is a research gap, and there is no relevant research to explore and analyze it. If this problem can be effectively solved, researchers believe that it will help to improve the effect of the online classroom.

We find that because of the above three reasons, the problems in all the online classes mentioned above are difficult to solve, so they still exist after being put forward for a long time, and some problems even have a tendency to grow worse over time.