Sustaining Collaborative Learning among University Students in the Wake of COVID-19: The Perspective of Online Community Project

This study aims at reconstructing an online classroom community project as an alternative to physical collaborative teaching-learning process by identifying the challenges militating against the implementation of an online classroom community project and the possible solutions to mitigate the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Ubuntu was used to theorise the study within the Transformative Paradigm (TP) and Participatory Research (PR) lens as a research design. Ten participants were selected among 810 first-year students who were twice given online community project assessments during the COVID-19 lockdown. The participants were selected using convenient sampling technique because, as at the time of the study, the they are under level 3 lockdown. Thematic analysis was adopted to serve the current research objectives. The study found out some challenges such as: students struggle to locate group members and unstable internet access and electricity shortage mitigate their learning. The study also revealed that tolerance among group members and consistent utilisation of online community project are the possible ways to implement online classroom community project in University classrooms more effectively.