Students’ Experiences With Digital Literacy And Education Inequality During The Covid-19 Pandemic (A Case Study at a Public Islamic University in Aceh)

Digital literacy was proven to be indispensable. Millions of learners from around the world were abruptly transitioned from face-to-face to virtual realms during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, many of these students faced significant challenges that could prevent them from fully participating in online learning activities. For example, many university students in Indonesia simply do not have adequate knowledge and skills to navigate their online learning process. Therefore, this study aims to determine how digital illiteracy affects students' online learning engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study also explores what universities need to provide to help students to develop their digital competence. The data was collected through in-depth interviews with 13 respondents (eight students and five lecturers). These participants were chosen because of their experiences in the online teaching-learning processes using various online platforms, including synchronous and asynchronous virtual classroom. Synchronous learning is the type of learning that teachers and students do live (in real-time) through the internet network, such as using Zoom or Google Meet. Meanwhile, asynchronous learning occurs through community forums or online platforms, such as discussion boards, email, lesson plans, virtual libraries, and college posts, without real-time interactions. This research adopted Miles and Huberman's theory towards the qualitative analysis of their experiences and ideas toward digital literacy, which affects their online learning engagement. The findings show that students' online learning engagement is influenced by digital illiteracy, which makes them unable to understand the online courses and follow the learning instructions; they are constrained due to the difficulties in operating the digital tools to accomplish the virtual assignments, apart from this the students become unable to synergized with their lecturers and fulfill their learning needs. The students felt helpless in maintaining their mental well-being. The data also suggest the university can develop the students’ digital competence by developing good educational systems, maintaining it, then pursuing an improvement through enhancing the poor digital learning system. Therefore, this study is expected to be a reference for further digital literacy research and providing support for suggestions in revamping digital learning training and the availability of online classroom learning laboratories.