Stress, frustration, boredom, and fatigue in online engineering education during the pandemic

Abstract

The educational crisis process generated by the Coronavirus COVID-19 had major consequences on the academic and personal life of university students. Universities had to move from the traditional classes and laboratories to the online platform. As extant research shows, this shift to online education had many negative consequences. The objective of this research is to analyze in more detail the relationship between stress, frustration, boredom, and fatigue and to identify the main factors that affect the online learning experience of students during the pandemic. The analysis is a mix of a quantitative and qualitative study that has been done on a sample of 177 university students from a university of construction engineering in Bucharest. The analysis of quantitative data revealed a significant and relatively high correlation between stress, frustration, boredom, and fatigue. The qualitative analysis sheds light on the relationship between these variables and the loss of attention, learning difficulties, and lack of face-to-face communication, socialization, and interaction.