Student experiences on academic support offered during COVID-19 lockdown

This is a qualitative phenomenological study to explore the participants’ experiences with the academic support offered by the college during the COVID-19 lockdown. The population in this study were 194 level 3 students who were enrolled in the course “Course leading to registration in the category Staff Nurse (General Nurse)” at a public nursing college in Gauteng in 2020. Non-probability purposive sampling was used to select 14 participants who met the inclusion criteria. The researcher interviewed fourteen voluntary participants. The researcher conducted unstructured face-to-face interviews, to collect in-depth and rich information to answer the study question. The fundamental research question was how undergraduate nursing students experienced the academic support offered during COVID-19 lockdown in a public college in Gauteng. Thematic data analysis was done using Colaizzi steps of data analysis. Different color codes were used to categorize data. Data was collected for two weeks from fourteen individual interviews with level three students enrolled for the course at four campuses of a selected public college in Gauteng. The duration of each interview lasted between 30-60 minutes. Information was collected until data saturation was reached.