Investigation of students perception of the online learning process during pandemic using statistical and data mining methods

Abstract

Almost all the fields of the world suffered a tremendous crisis due to the covid 19 pandemic and especially the
education sector faced a complete transformation into a digital and online form to serve the student community
whereas the majority of students were not prepared for such transformation and struggled a lot. In this study, an
attempt was made to investigate the perception of the students who have undergone the online learning process
during pandemic. A questionnaire concerning various components of the online learning process was prepared
and an online survey was conducted among college students of Chennai, India. Data of 317 valid respondents
subjected to various statistical methods and k means clustering algorithm. The results explored that the mean
ratings of all the components ranged between (3 to 3.6) out of 5 with a standard deviation of (0.98 to 1.28). Some
demographic characteristics such as ‘Income’ and ‘Gender’ had a significant effect on the component ‘Device
and Network’. Further, the respondents are clustered into three groups of (154, 74, 89) students, independent of
all the demographic characteristics, but significantly different with respect to all the components of the survey.