Exploring the pharmacy students’ perspectives on off-campus online learning experiences amid COVID-19 crises: A cross-sectional survey

[Display omitted] •The e-learning during COVID-19 has placed enormous challenges for the pharmacy students integrity and effectiveness of learning.•The e-learning has transformed the pharmacy students learning into more exciting and challenging environment that may impact their assessment and examination results.•The e-learning has changed the academic culture of pharmacy students of learning with prosperous future prospects. The pandemic of COVID-19 has placed many challenges for pharmacy students’ learning experiences via the online e- system. There is paucity of studies that addresses this in colleges of pharmacies in United Arab Emirates (UAE). We have explored the preparedness, attitudes, experiences, and barriers/facilitators, and delineated factors that may affect the pharmacy students’ e-learning process amid the COVID-19 crises. The current study was cross-sectional, and survey-based (anonymously self-administered) that utilized theoretical domains framework. The survey (multiple statements) was comprised of four domains (based on theoretical domain framework) that has elaborated on the preparedness, attitudes, experiences and barriers for the pharmacy students’ e-learning (all years and interns). The validated (Cronbach Alfa 0.821) and piloted survey posted to the Google form and a link distributed to the pharmacy students. The survey was comprised of four domains (34 statements), distributed as five in preparedness, eleven in attitude, eleven in the experiences, and seven in the barriers/facilitators (theoretical domains framework). The primary outcome was the total sum of scores of individual statements and each individual four domain of the questionnaire (preparedness, attitude, experiences, and barriers/facilitators). Two hundred thirty respondents participated in the survey (230/400, response rate 57.5%), of which 193 were females (83.9%) versus 37 males (16.1%). The mean age (years) was 19.9 ± 1.9 (males 19.8 ± 1.6 and females 20.0 ± 1.9). The mean total score for preparedness Q1 to Q5 (domain maximum score 25); and for the attitude Q6 to Q16 (domain maximum score of 60) were 14.9 ± 3.8 (95% CI 14.4 – 15.4; P