Learning from Home: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Live Streaming Based Remote Education Experience in Chinese Colleges during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 global pandemic and resulted lockdown policies have forced education in nearly every country to switch from a traditional co-located paradigm to a pure online “distance learning from home” paradigm. Lying in the center of this learning paradigm shift is the emergence and wide adoption of distance communication tools and live streaming platforms for education. Here, we present a mixed-methods study on live streaming based education experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus our analysis on Chinese higher education, carried out semi-structured interviews on 30 students, and 7 instructors from diverse colleges and disciplines, meanwhile launched a large-scale survey covering 6291 students and 1160 instructors in one leading Chinese university. Our study not only reveals important design guidelines and insights to better support current remote learning experience during the pandemic, but also provides valuable implications towards constructing future collaborative education supporting systems and experience after pandemic.