The coronavirus crisis impacted higher education institutions in many new and unexpected ways bringing both challenges and opportunities particularly in relation to distance education and digitally enhanced learning and teaching. Lectures and their students across the world were forced into this new reality without the requisite time to plan, consult the theory, develop supports, embed relevant pedagogies and have curriculum alignment in the online environment between content, teaching, learning and assessment (Toqero 2020; Rudolph et al., 2023).  The move to distance education for many institutions was more akin to emergency response teaching than theory informed online learning (Adedoyin and Soykan 2020). This research aims to examine how student agency impacted their engagement with online learning during the lock down in one Irish university. This first year cohort (2020-2021) experienced arguably the most change with traditional second level examinations being cancelled for the first time in the history of the state, transition into third level during a pandemic that mitigated the usual rites of passage taking place and the need to adapt to learning in an online environment with classmates and lecturers that in many cases they had never met face-to-face.

Some research has found that there is a significant positive effect of the COVID-19 lockdowns on students’ performance because they changed their learning strategies to a more continuous habit and this had led to better grades in assignments (Gonzalez et al., 2020). However, others found that stress, anxiety, loneliness and mental health concerns increased during the pandemic lockdowns with students feeling more isolated (Elmer at al., 2020; Liu et al., 2020). One of the key challenges encountered by higher education institutions was the sudden shift to distance learning and the need for a change of pedagogical thinking (Marinoni et al., 2020; Pokhrel and Chhetri 2021). This challenge comes with different dimensions, most particularly the technical infrastructure, the support tools to use for distance learning, assimilating online teaching pedagogies, providing structure for students to collaborate,  giving feedback on learning and finally how to organise and manage student assessments from distance (Besser et al., 2020). For students it meant they needed to be more self-directed in their learning. This research project aimed to develop a comprehensive understanding of how agency was impacted by these changed conditions.

To explore the affordances and challenges faced by students learning in this changed environment we used the concept of agency to frame our analysis of data. To analyse what constitutes agency, Emirbayer and Mische (1998) define agency as constructing engagement with structure through individuals’ temporal reflection on the past, present and future. This temporality emerged as critical for these students as they missed out on key experiences needed to build competences for present learning and motivation for future aspirations. Biesta and Tedder’s (2007) conceptualised agency as one’s “ability to exert control over … one’s life” (p. 135) by means of structure rather than simply within structure. Later Priestley and colleagues (2015) described agency as being always informed by past experience and is oriented towards some future goal. They go on to say that “agency is always enacted in a concrete situation” (p.30) and is supported and constrained by available cultural, structural and material resources. These resources to support learning at third level changed during the COVID-19 lockdowns in Ireland. The impact of these changes was not uniformly felt by individuals and in some instances they exacerbated existing inequalities (Daly and Cahill 2018).

In this paper, we draw from data collected from a cohort of first year new entrants who attend a university in the Republic of Ireland. Using a mixed method case study approach we seek to address the gap in understanding how young people at third level made the transition from second level and engaged with learning in the online environment. Our intention has not been to make representative claims about all young people who experienced this transition but to investigate young people’s experience of learning at a particular historical moment. However, the representative nature of our data allows us to make claims about and provide a fine-grained analysis of young people’s accounts within our case study site. The research site itself represents an interesting case study because it has the most diverse university student intake in the Republic of Ireland. A liberal arts and sciences university, it has the highest share of entrants with a disability (15% compared to 13% in the university sector) and the highest share of entrants from target socio-economic groups (29% compared to a sectoral average of 24%) in the Irish university sector (HEA 2020). Data was gathered through an online survey that was designed in collaboration with the University Students’ Union. The online survey sought to capture the undergraduate experience during a pandemic and draws inspiration from a number of international studies specifically designed for undergraduate cohorts including the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY), the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen (NLSF), and the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU). Our survey included specific questions relating to learning in the online environment. The online survey was distributed to all 3,255 first year students by the university on behalf of the research team, between December 2020 and January 2021. 22 per cent (n= 727) of the first-year cohort completed the survey. While the data collection yielded a marginal over-representation of females, high point students and mature students, a weight was calculated from key strata and the results were re-weighted to render them representative of the population of first year students. In addition to these data interviews were carried out with twelve students to further elucidate key trends from the survey. Qualitative data were then analysed thematically using the concept of agency as a lens to better understand the accounts of young people of their experience.

The survey asked students about the type of academic obstacles that they faced in adapting successfully to online learning. These have been categorised into two broad categories: adaptive and technical (Heifetz et al., 2009). Most are adaptive, and there are a few lingering technical problems . The greatest challenge experienced by first year students was a lack of motivation for remote learning – 80% of students cited this as an obstacle, with almost 40% citing it as their greatest challenge. Other obstacles included lack of interaction with other students (74%), and inability to learn effectively in an online format (60%). Almost half of first-year students cited ‘lack of clear expectations for online learning from lecturing staff’ as an obstacle, and just over a third (34%) cited ‘lack of access to an appropriate study space or distracting home environment’. Replicating other studies, these findings suggest that adaptive rather technical issue were key obstacles. In general the findings suggest students experienced considerable obstacles when transitioning to online learning, and the obstacles outweigh the benefits. Low mood was significantly associated with these obstacles. The role of agency in these responses is considerable and this is explored more fully in the paper. Indicators of engagement with active learning (reflective and integrative learning, collaborative learning and use of active learning strategies) indicate that students were engaging in these activities less frequently than a previous cohort of first-year students as a result of remote learning. Just over half set goals for their learning. These findings indicate that this cohort of students were significantly disadvantaged in starting their study during a pandemic and that the consequences need to be taken into account by their university. These findings add to the body of literature on online learning and the role of personal agency in successful engagement within this environment.

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