Research Proposal Sample on Remote Learning

This is a research proposal sample on the impact of remote learning on education during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the empirical focus on Malaysian universities. It has the sections most proposal briefs ask for: an introduction, a thematic literature review, a literature gap, a summary of what the literature found, a comparison of research methods, and a theoretical and conceptual framework. The nine studies it reviews were published in 2020 and 2021, and that is the period the evidence refers to.

If you are looking for the main guide to this format on our site, start with our example of a research proposal, which walks through the structure section by section. Two other proposals take different topics: a sample research proposal on social media marketing in the UK and a dissertation proposal example. For the assignment version of the same skills, see the business research methods assignment sample.

What Does a Research Proposal Need to Contain?

A research proposal needs seven parts: a problem statement, a literature review organised by theme rather than by author, an explicit gap, aims and research questions, a methodology with a justified design and sample, a theoretical or conceptual framework, and references. Marks are lost most often on the gap and the justification of the method.

What Does This Proposal on Remote Learning Argue?

It argues that remote learning during Covid-19 brought real benefits and real costs at once, and that the balance depends on the country. Students valued flexibility, lower costs and course material they could revisit; others lost structure, easy contact with tutors and reliable assessment, and pupils with special needs were poorly served. Too little of this evidence comes from Malaysia.

The review behind that argument sorts nine studies into three themes: what remote learning gave students, what it took from them, and what happened in Malaysian universities in particular. The sections below follow the proposal in the order it was handed in, from the introduction to the conceptual framework.

Research Proposal Sample Work

Introduction

The pandemic broke the established pattern of teaching and forced a new approach to academic learning. Remote learning became the ordinary way of studying rather than the exception, and both students and teachers had to use it. That change pushed many students into new learning styles and new ways of communicating with their tutors, and it made some teaching more effective than it had been (Amir et al., 2020). It also allowed learning and teaching from anywhere with a working internet connection (Simamora et al., 2020). The effects on students were mixed, and that mix is the subject of this proposal: the study sets out to weigh the progress made against the ground lost during Covid-19. Because several elements act on learning at once, the process needs to be observed systematically rather than judged as a whole, and this research is designed to separate those elements.

Each section examines one part of remote learning during Covid-19. The study looks at the changes in the academic sector, the curriculum, the way tutors and students communicate, assessment, and how students managed their time, and then asks what those changes did to learning and academic progress. Changes in the use of technology are examined in the same way, with Malaysia as the setting. Keeping to one country produces a country-specific assessment rather than a general one, and it allows the curriculum and the learning habits of different age groups to be treated separately. The result should be a reading of academic performance that is tied to how remote learning was actually delivered.

Literature Review

Covid-19 affected almost every part of the world and education was no exception. The sudden outbreak forced a series of changes on the sector, and one of the fastest was the move to remote learning. This section reviews the existing literature on remote learning and on the effect it has had on the way teaching is delivered. The studies are grouped into three themes rather than discussed one by one, because the disagreements between them are easier to see that way. The first theme collects the studies that report gains, the second those that report costs, and the third the small group that looked at Malaysia.

Theme 1: Benefits of Remote Learning

Remote learning became a common term during Covid-19. It describes learning that does not require the student to be physically present in a classroom: the tutor teaches through digital platforms instead. It mattered because the lockdowns closed almost every school, college and university, and remote delivery was what kept teaching going. The studies of university students report real benefits.

Fatonia et al. (2020), in “University Students’ Online Learning System During Covid-19 Pandemic”, asked 100 students at private universities in Indonesia what online learning had given them. The advantages they named were about place and time: they could follow classes from home, from anywhere and at any hour, so a course could be fitted around everything else. “Distance Education Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic from the Students’ Point of View” reaches a similar conclusion from a larger sample. Mahasneh et al. (2021) surveyed 377 university students in Jordan, and the benefits reported most often were lower costs and personal expenses, the chance to go back over course material whenever it was needed, a higher grade point average and the ability to take more courses in a semester.

Theme 2: Drawbacks of Remote Learning

Remote learning keeps the student out of the classroom and at home, and it became the normal arrangement during the Covid-19 pandemic. Its first drawback is the loss of social interaction and the isolation that follows. Without a timetable and without physical activity, motivation is harder to sustain. In “The Drawbacks of Learning from Home: A Student Perspective”, Christiawan (2021) notes that learning from home became a common strategy worldwide during Covid-19, in higher education as much as in schools, as the way to keep teaching going and to meet the challenges e-learning presented. The problems he identifies are poor time management, the absence of a clear lesson plan, and too many assignments set by the lecturer. Student motivation was still holding up when the study was done, but he expects it to fall if those weaknesses persist.

El Refae, Kaba & Eletter (2021), in “Distance Learning during COVID-19 Pandemic”, suggest that the drawbacks persist even where the move went well. They surveyed 445 students and 139 faculty members at Al Ain University in March 2020. Both groups were highly satisfied with how ready the university was for distance learning and saw real opportunities in it, and both still raised concerns about the challenges it brought.

Debeş (2021), in “Distance Learning in Higher Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Advantages and Disadvantages”, looks at the same period from the staff side. Of the 27 university administrators and lecturers interviewed in North Cyprus, all but one reported educational challenges, and technical problems were the challenge they named most often, ahead of teaching effectiveness, learner participation and assessment. The paper argues that distance learning can make teaching less effective and assessment harder to run, and it traces part of the problem to educators misusing the technology. Most of the same respondents still judged that distance learning had more advantages than conventional teaching, so the drawbacks Debeş records are costs to be managed rather than a case against remote learning.

The costs fell hardest where support was already needed. In “Distance Education for Students with Special Needs in Primary Schools in the Period of the COVID-19 Epidemic”, Ayda et al. (2020) interviewed ten special-education teachers. Their views of distance education were mixed, but the study found provision for pupils with special needs inadequate: no individual education programmes were delivered at a distance, and materials suited to the pupils’ needs were lacking.

Theme 3: Impact of Remote Learning During Covid-19 in Malaysia

During Covid-19, Malaysian universities adopted a range of technologies and used them to support remote learning, and the evidence on the effect is mixed. In “Exploring the Impact of Transformation to Fully Online Learning During COVID-19 on Malaysian University Students”, Al-Kumaim et al. (2021) report that students met a series of obstacles with the IT platforms used for online activities. The main ones were workload, the volume of information sent through those platforms by educators, and technical difficulties caused by not being able to afford the equipment and connections online study assumes, along with stress and anxiety.

Salleh et al. (2020), in “The Impacts of COVID-19 through Online Learning Usage for Tertiary Education in Malaysia”, take a more favourable view. Their short discussion paper treats online learning as the platform through which educators shared their knowledge while the Movement Control Order kept campuses shut, sets out its advantages and disadvantages and how to overcome the latter, and argues that it was the right choice for tertiary teaching during that period.

Sufian, Nordin, Tauji & Nasir (2020), in “The Impacts of Covid-19 to the Situation of Malaysian Education”, is a concept paper on how the Malaysian system responded once classes moved online under the Movement Control Order from 13 March 2020. It names the hurdles: learning from home, access to equipment, group projects carried out virtually, internet capacity and assessment. Students whose families could not afford laptops or tablets, and those in rural areas without reliable internet access, were the most exposed, and the authors recommend sending materials by courier so that no student is left out.

Literature Gap

The reviewed studies leave a gap that this research is designed to fill. Only three of the nine deal with Malaysia at all, and only one of those, Al-Kumaim et al. (2021), collected data from students; the other two are discussion papers. That is too thin a base for a country-specific judgement. Cost is a case in point: the price of devices and internet access was among the main obstacles reported by students in Jordan (Mahasneh et al., 2021) and in Malaysia (Al-Kumaim et al., 2021), and a single Malaysian survey cannot show how that obstacle varied between institutions or regions.

Two further limits are worth stating plainly. The reviewed work reports what students and staff said at one point, in 2020 or 2021, rather than what happened to attainment over time, so the evidence on outcomes is weak. And the search behind this review was run entirely through Google Scholar, which favours indexed English-language journals and will have missed Malaysian institutional reporting. Both limits shape the design proposed below: a country-specific study, with the sample drawn from more than one Malaysian university.

Findings

The reviewed literature supports three findings. Remote learning changed the education sector and, more specifically, students’ study habits; the change brought benefits and challenges at the same time; and the balance between them depends on the setting, which is why Malaysia is treated separately here. Fatonia et al. (2020) and Mahasneh et al. (2021) show what university students gained: freedom from a fixed place and timetable, lower costs, and material they could return to. Ayda et al. (2020) show who was least well served: pupils with special educational needs, for whom distance provision was not adapted.

Christiawan (2021) and Debeş (2021) set out the other side: no clear lesson plan, weak time management, too many assignments, technical problems and assessment that is hard to run at a distance. Even where satisfaction was high, as in El Refae, Kaba & Eletter (2021), students and staff raised concerns about these challenges, and the drawbacks have to be named before they can be addressed. For Malaysia specifically, Al-Kumaim et al. (2021) found students weighed down by workload, the cost of equipment and connections, and stress, while Salleh et al. (2020) argue that online learning was still the right choice while campuses were closed.

These findings have one limit. The studies that collected data measure what students and staff reported, not what they achieved: none of them compares marks before and after the switch to remote delivery, and where grades appear, as in Mahasneh et al. (2021), they are the students’ own account. The findings therefore support claims about experience, access and motivation, and they do not support a claim about attainment.

Methodology

Each of the nine studies uses a different design, and the differences matter because they explain why the findings do not always agree. Ayda et al. (2020) use a qualitative method, interviewing ten special-education teachers with semi-structured questions. Fatonia et al. (2020) also work qualitatively, through a semi-structured questionnaire answered online by 100 students at private universities in Indonesia. Mahasneh et al. (2021) take a cross-sectional approach with a sample of 377 university students in Jordan, using a valid and reliable questionnaire in three parts on the forms, benefits and obstacles of distance education. El Refae, Kaba & Eletter (2021) use an online survey of 445 students and 139 faculty members and a quantitative strategy, testing their hypotheses with structural equation modelling. Christiawan (2021) uses a qualitative design, distributing a questionnaire online, with 100 responses analysed by analytic induction.

How the nine reviewed studies collected their evidence

Point of comparison	Design	Who took part
Ayda et al. (2020)	Design Qualitative, semi-structured interviews	Who took part 10 special-education teachers
Fatonia et al. (2020)	Design Qualitative survey, semi-structured questionnaire online	Who took part 100 students at private universities in Indonesia
Mahasneh et al. (2021)	Design Cross-sectional, questionnaire in three parts	Who took part 377 university students in Jordan
El Refae, Kaba & Eletter (2021)	Design Online survey, structural equation modelling	Who took part 445 students and 139 faculty members at Al Ain University
Christiawan (2021)	Design Qualitative, online questionnaire, analytic induction	Who took part 100 student respondents
Debeş (2021)	Design Interview form, called quantitative in the abstract and qualitative in the method section	Who took part 14 administrators and 13 lecturers in North Cyprus
Al-Kumaim et al. (2021)	Design Mixed methods, mainly qualitative	Who took part 486 students at Malaysian universities
Salleh et al. (2020)	Design Discussion paper, secondary sources	Who took part No participants
Sufian, Nordin, Tauji & Nasir (2020)	Design Concept paper, secondary sources	Who took part No participants

Debeş (2021) interviewed 14 administrators and 13 lecturers at universities in North Cyprus and reports descriptive statistics. The paper describes its design as quantitative in the abstract and as a survey using qualitative data in the method section, which limits how far its percentages can be read as measurement. Al-Kumaim et al. (2021) use a mixed method weighted towards qualitative data, with 486 students from different Malaysian universities. Salleh et al. (2020) is a short discussion paper drawing on secondary sources. Sufian, Nordin, Tauji & Nasir (2020) is a concept paper that draws on Ministry of Education guidance and earlier studies to describe how the Malaysian education system responded. The proposed study follows the qualitative studies in this list rather than the survey-based ones, because the question is why outcomes differed rather than how many students were affected.

Theoretical Framework

Online collaborative learning (OCL) is the theory used here to explain why online teaching worked better in some cases than others during Covid-19. Proposed by Linda Harasim, it treats the internet as an environment in which knowledge is built collaboratively, not as a channel for delivering lectures. On that reading, the design of the online space decides how much collaboration happens, and therefore how much is learned (Magen-Nagar & Shonfeld, 2018). OCL also gives an account of the internet's place in formal and non-formal education in the knowledge age. Its practical value for this study is that it predicts better outcomes where students work through problems together, which is a testable claim rather than a general endorsement of online learning.

Conceptual Framework

Figure 1: Conceptual framework of the impact of remote learning through the lens of Covid-19

(Source: self-created)

Conclusion

This proposal has reviewed nine articles on online learning during the pandemic and set out what they establish and what they leave open. It has also stated the gap in that literature: the remote-learning process has been studied mostly outside Malaysia, and the role of the technology used to deliver it deserves country-specific treatment.

Importance of This Study

The pandemic disrupted education and it changed how students learn. Because the effects run both ways, they can be used to assess what actually changed in academic learning. On the positive side, the reviewed studies report gains for students who took to online learning, and that is the premise this study builds on. Each study contributes part of the picture of how remote delivery altered traditional teaching. This study sets out to show which methods and technologies improved learning in the Malaysian education sector specifically rather than in general.

The proposal separates the learning process itself from the factors acting on it. Weighing the advantages and disadvantages of remote learning in the Malaysian setting shows what an engaged approach to online teaching can achieve and where the limits of learning and teaching at a distance lie. Setting the process and its difficulties side by side is what makes the evaluation critical rather than descriptive.

What Would a Marker Say About This Proposal?

A marker would credit the thematic review and a theory that makes a prediction the study could test. They would take marks off for what a proposal needs and this one lacks: numbered aims and research questions, a sample, instrument and analysis plan of its own, a timeline and an ethics statement. Add those before modelling your proposal on it.

The review is organised by theme, not paper by paper. That is what makes the disagreements between studies visible, and it is the difference a marker looks for between a literature review and an annotated bibliography.

The methodology section follows the rule for this part of a proposal: justify rather than describe. Name the design, name the alternative you rejected, and give the reason in one sentence tied to your research question. Here the comparison of nine designs ends in that sentence: a qualitative study, because the question is why outcomes differed rather than how many students were affected.

The theoretical framework earns its place by making a prediction. Online collaborative learning predicts that modules which built in group work and discussion produced better outcomes than modules that put recorded lectures online, and a qualitative study of this kind can test that. A framework that only decorates the introduction earns no marks.

In a real submission we would change two things. “Findings” is the wrong heading in a proposal, because no data has been collected yet; call it “What the Literature Shows” and keep its last paragraph, which states the limit of the evidence instead of overreaching. And the methodology spends most of its length on other people’s designs; a proposal needs at least a paragraph on its own participants and how they will be recruited.

The same structure is applied to other topics in our sample research proposal on social media marketing and UK consumer behaviour, written for a business research methods brief, and in the proposal on CSR and brand image at the Tata Group. More proposals and dissertation samples are in our dissertation samples, and the service page is thesis and dissertation help.

Need help with a research proposal on remote learning, or on your own topic? Message us on WhatsApp with the topic, the word count and the deadline.

Sources and References

• El Refae, G. A., Kaba, A., & Eletter, S. (2021). Distance learning during COVID-19 pandemic: satisfaction, opportunities and challenges as perceived by faculty members and students. Interactive Technology and Smart Education. doi.org/10.1108/itse-08-2020-0128
• Debeş, G. (2021). Distance learning in higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic: advantages and disadvantages: Distance learning in higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic. International Journal of Curriculum and Instruction, 13(2), 1109-1118. eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1292029
• Ayda, N. K., Bastas, M., Altınay, F., Altinay, Z., & Dagli, G. (2020). Distance education for students with special needs in primary schools in the period of the COVID-19 epidemic. Propósitos y representaciones, 8(3), 43. doi.org/10.20511/pyr2020.v8n3.587
• Fatonia, N. A., Nurkhayatic, E., Nurdiawatid, E., Fidziahe, G. P., Adhag, S., Irawanh, A. P., ... & Azizik, E. (2020). University students online learning system during Covid-19 pandemic: Advantages, constraints and solutions. Systematic reviews in pharmacy, 11(7), 570-576. sysrevpharm.org (PDF)
• Mahasneh, O. M., Al-kreimeen, R. A., Alrammana, A. A., & Murad, O. S. (2021). Distance Education Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic from the Students' Point of View. World Journal on Educational Technology: Current Issues, 13(4), 589-601. doi.org/10.18844/wjet.v13i4.6229
• Al-Kumaim, N. H., Mohammed, F., Gazem, N. A., Fazea, Y., Alhazmi, A. K., & Dakkak, O. (2021). Exploring the Impact of Transformation to Fully Online Learning During COVID-19 on Malaysian University Students' Academic Life and Performance. International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies, 15(5). doi.org/10.3991/ijim.v15i05.20203
• Salleh, F. I. M., Ghazali, J. M., Ismail, W. N. H. W., Alias, M., & Rahim, N. S. A. (2020). The impacts of COVID-19 through online learning usage for tertiary education in Malaysia. Journal of Critical Reviews, 7(8), 147-149. DOI: 10.31838/jcr.07.08.30
• Sufian, S. A., Nordin, N. A., Tauji, S. S. N., & Nasir, M. K. M. (2020). The impacts of Covid-19 to the situation of Malaysian education. International Journal of Academic Research in Progressive Education & Development, 9(2), 764-774. doi.org/10.6007/IJARPED/v9-i2/7659
• Amir, L. R., Tanti, I., Maharani, D. A., Wimardhani, Y. S., Julia, V., Sulijaya, B., & Puspitawati, R. (2020). Student perspective of classroom and distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic in the undergraduate dental study program Universitas Indonesia. BMC Medical Education, 20(1), 1-8. doi.org/10.1186/s12909-020-02312-0
• Simamora, R. M., De Fretes, D., Purba, E. D., & Pasaribu, D. (2020). Practices, challenges, and prospects of online learning during Covid-19 pandemic in higher education: Lecturer perspectives. Studies in Learning and Teaching, 1(3), 185-208. doi.org/10.46627/silet.v1i3.45
• Magen-Nagar, N., & Shonfeld, M. (2018). The impact of an online collaborative learning program on students’ attitude towards technology. Interactive Learning Environments, 26(5), 621-637. doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2017.1376336
• Christiawan, P. I. (2021, January). The drawbacks of learning from home: A student perspective. In ICLSSE 2020: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Law, Social Sciences and Education, ICLSSE 2020, 10 November, Singaraja, Bali, Indonesia (p. 314). European Alliance for Innovation. doi.org/10.4108/eai.10-11-2020.2303360