Adaptation, validation, reliability and assessment of an attitude towards online education scale for university students in the COVID-19 crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the rolling out of online education worldwide, prompting the need to investigate the “new normal”. The aim of this study was to adapt, validate, confirm the viability of and assess an attitude towards online education scale for university students in the context of the pandemic. The quantitative research consisted of basic, descriptive-level research with a descriptive transversal design. The technique used was a survey with application of the abovementioned scale. The cross-cultural adaptation and translation of the Instrument to Measure University Students' Attitude towards E-learning developed by Mehra and Omidian (2012) was carried out by inverse translation and back translation. Due to the context, it was adjusted from 83 to 63 items, and compressibility was evaluated by means of a pilot test and information-gathering and paraphrasing by interviews with a sample of 50 university students. The content was validated with 16 experts, whose Aiken's V coefficients were higher than.85, and construct validation, with a sample of 6,852 university students from two regions in Peru, was between sufficient and excellent via Pearson's adjusted correlation coefficient. The reliability evaluation yielded a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of.96, equivalent to very reliable. The scale was graded into four levels: strong negative (63-126), weak negative (127-189), weak positive (190-252) and strong positive (253-315). In conclusion, we were able to successfully adapt, validate, confirm the reliability of and assess the attitude towards online education scale for university students in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, making it ideal for studies in Latin American scenarios.