The provision of higher education has for decades remained largely static, with the dominant forms of tuition being classroom-based lectures, tutorials and small-group learning, to mention a few. With the temporal surreal presence of COVID-19, tuition was disrupted by severe lockdown measures which necessitated an immediate shift to emergency remote learning (ERL). Given the short time frame to pivot to remote learning, many changes were brought about to manage the situation in order to minimise angst and to prepare students for remote learning. At this university of technology in South Africa, students were provided with: data, couriered notes, memory sticks with learning resources, as well as guidelines for remote learning, teaching and assessment. Data presented in this paper were drawn from a study whose purpose was to explore how first-year students from the faculty of Business and Management Sciences experienced remote learning in the midst of the pandemic, when remote learning was the only tuition modality available to staff and students. In this qualitative and quantitative study, a survey was administered to 602 first-year students. The qualitative data presented in this paper were analysed by means of thematic analysis in order to arrive at themes on how students learned and if there were learning strategies worth to be pursued post-pandemic. The data revealed that students’ self-directed learning proved to be beneficial during ERL. To this end, socio-cultural frameworks for developing student agency and self-directed learning informed the underpinning theories which served as an analytical lens for data analysis. The findings showed that despite the challenges of learning remotely, first-year students developed self-directed learning strategies which enabled them to navigate their way through first year studies. The contribution of the work presented in this paper to the student learning debate is that remote learning held many positives that should not be lost with the return to in-person classes and lessons learnt may well be applied by the university in times of crisis and beyond. Given the positives of remote learning presented by first-year students in this study, the thesis presented here is that the institution and other higher education providers should consider embracing the insights emanating from this study in order to align their teaching modalities with students’ learning preferences and learning modalities.

Keywords: Higher education, remote learning, student agency, COVID-19.