The Oxford online dictionary defines “fears” as the bad feelings someone has when being in danger or frightened. In the educational environment, fears may cause significant psychological distress, fears of vagueness, and uncertainty, which could directly impose unpleasant effects on overall learning, academic achievement, and the general well-being of students (Elsharkawy and Abdelaziz, 2021). Similarly, Arpaci et al. (2020) considered fears a multifaceted factor, often one of the most crucial underlying factors of conceded mental health and well-being. During the COVID-19 pandemic, fears become one of the most frequent emotions that may spread much faster from one to another than the disease itself (Arpaci et al., 2020).

The outbreak of a fatal and infectious disease named COVID-19 has caused the closure of most educational institutions worldwide. To maintain the continuity of education in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, online learning was implemented as no more than an option, but a necessity (Singh and Thurman, 2019), even when some underdeveloped and developing nations have been unready. For instance, Pakistanis education pointed out the undesired learning satisfaction among students, whose online learning conditions were restricted not only in technical issues but also monetary issues (Adnan and Anwar, 2020).

In Vietnam, as one of the developing countries in Southeast Asia, online learning has been implemented to meet the demand of the global educational trend; however, it also imposes a wide range of difficulties for the authorities and educators. With regard to the online learning barriers in the current context, most Vietnamese students, especially students in the Mekong Delta, considered that limited social interaction had caused a lot of challenges for them when learning online (Van and Thi, 2021a,b). Subsequently, the so-called cost and access to the Internet and some technical issues have prevented students from becoming successful online learners. These challenges were followed by learners’ skepticism about learning quality when most of them thought that they paid more than what they knew and could not understand as effectively as when they were on campus.

Adaptability is understood as appropriate cognitive, behavioral, and/or affective adjustment in the face of uncertainty and novelty (Martin et al., 2013). The American Psychological Association’s (APA) has officially defined adaptability as “the capacity to make appropriate responses to changed or changing situations; the ability to modify or adjust one’s behavior in meeting different circumstances or different people” (VandenBos, 2007). Prior studies highlighted the vital role of adaptability in constructing students’ engagement and achievements (Martin et al., 2013; Collie et al., 2017), reducing students’ failure dynamics (Martin et al., 2015). Holliman et al. (2018) especially emphasized the connection between adaptability and students’ engagement and long-term achievement. As a matter of fact, adaptability plays an essential role in students’ positive development (Martin et al., 2021).

The study was conducted to measure the levels of fear among students about the COVID 19 pandemic. We also wanted to assess Vietnamese students’ adaptability to online learning in the context of the pandemic. Ultimately, we aimed to investigate whether such fears of COVID-19 affect their adaptability to online learning or not.

To address these aims, the following questions were posed:

A mixed-method study was designed to find out answers to research questions. Accordingly, data will be collected in parallel, analyzed separately, and merged to provide a complete understanding of research problems (Creswell and Creswell, 2017). Mixed-method studies are also preferred since they provide a deeper and broader understanding of the phenomenon than the study taken only with a qualitative or quantitative approach (Hurmerinta-Peltomäki and Nummela, 2006).

In this study, the FCV19 Scale and Adaptability Scale were adapted to confirm the extent of students’ fears of the pandemic and their adaptability to online learning, with the first use of Exploratory Factor Analyses. Then, we employed statistics on means of these scales and ran CFA and SEM to examine the influences of FCV19 on students’ adaptability in online learning. Also, in this study, we wanted to get insights into students’ explanations for their rating with items in the survey; open-ended questions were added to call for students’ answers. To ensure the validity and reliability of answers from open-ended questions, we followed Brislin’s model of translation (Brislin, 1986), which is widely accepted and used to translate quantitative instruments but is time-consuming (Lopez et al., 2008). Accordingly, one researcher took the responsibility to translate the answers from Vietnamese to English. The second researcher would then back-translate the results from English into Vietnamese. The third researcher compared both versions to check accuracy and consistency. Any discrepancies would be negotiated before figuring out the final answers.

Both quantitative and qualitative findings were triangulated to write up the results. The research model is illustrated in Figure 1.

To solve the research issues, we adapted the FCV19 scale (Ahorsu et al., 2020) and Adaptability scale (Martin et al., 2012) as the research instruments. According to Natalia and Syakurah (2021), FCV19 Scales is useful to evaluate the fear of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Adaptability Scale (Martin et al., 2013) is also a comprehensive measurement for assessing students’ cognitive, behavioral, and emotional adaptability (Holliman et al., 2021).

There are sixteen items that help measure learners’ fears of the pandemic and their online learning adaptability in the current context. A Vietnamese version was created to help learners familiarize themselves with the questionnaire before launching it to collect data on Google Form in September 2021. Table A1 displays all the variables measured for the study’s primary constructs. Participants were asked to choose the extent they agree with each statement, ranging from (1) Completely disagree to (5) Completely agree.

An Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) with Principle Axis Factoring and Promax rotation was used in the study. The results showed that FCV19 was a unidimensional factor when the seven items were loaded into only one group, with Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy (KMO) at 0.878 and the initial eigenvalues were greater than 1. The significant level of Bartlett’s was at 0.000, proving all the variables were correlated. They were accounted for 62.64 of all variance. According to Hair et al. (2006): “… in the social sciences, where information is often less precise, it is not uncommon to consider a solution that accounts for 60% of the total variance (and in some cases even less) as to satisfactory” (p. 104).

Simultaneously, a similar EFA was applied for the Adaptability scales, with KMO at 0.900, a significant Bartlett’s test level at 0.000, and qualified initial eigenvalues (> 1). Noticeably, nine items were loaded into two groups of factors, namely the Cognitive-behavioral factor and the Affective factor, precisely the same as the result of Martin et al.’s (2012) study. Details about the results of EFA for these scales were displayed in Tables 1–3 as follows.

567 university students in the Mekong Delta, who were learning online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, joined in answering a web-based questionnaire. They are from 18 to 24 years old, including 199 male students (35.1%) and 368 female students (64.9%). Most of them came back to their hometown, and a few were stuck in the university regions. They are living in 13 provinces in the Mekong Delta. According to statistics on the locals with COVID-19 infected cases, there are 503 students (87.1%) living in the pandemic areas, only 73 students (12.9%) being in non-COVID-19 regions. Details about distribution of participants and the COVID-19 risk levels by provinces will be illustrated in Figures 2,3.

The findings indicated Vietnamese students’ moderate level of fears of the COVID-19 pandemic (M = 3.58, SD = 0.96) and their high level of adaptability (M = 4.19, SD = 0.62) in learning online, based on the adaptation of the two research instruments, namely the FCV19 Scale (Ahorsu et al., 2020) and the Adaptability Scale (Martin et al., 2012). In addition, results from the qualitative analysis help clarify reasons students were scared of the pandemic and how they exposed their strong sense of adaptability in the context of the pandemic.

Concerning Vietnamese students’ fears of the COVID-19 pandemic, most participants in this study agreed that they were most afraid of the pandemic (F1, M = 4.12, SD = 0.960), which made them feel uncomfortable to think about the Coronavirus (F2, M = 4.06, SD = 0.963). These findings proved humans’ commonsense when the pandemic has been threatening anyone’s life since 2019. Though many students have not witnessed the consequences of the pandemic in their current place of living, they have still been afraid of it through news and other updated information from the Internet. Nevertheless, students have rated just above average for other items of the FCV19 questionnaire; those are explained as items expressing different extreme levels of people’s fears about the virus. Specifically, students almost approved the idea F5 (M = 3.79, SD = 0.996) that when watching news and stories about the pandemic on social media, they become nervous or anxious. Responses from the open-ended question also supported that statement when students felt blue whenever they heard reports about the number of people dying due to the COVID-19 or pictures of severe cases requiring ECMO and ventilator support. Therefore, students feared losing their lives because of Coronavirus (M = 3.72, SD = 1.145). Students disagree with three physical reactions: F3, F6, and F7; more precisely, when students were asked whether they felt clammy when thinking of the Coronavirus, or whether they could not sleep because of the pandemic, or their hearts race or palpitate when thinking about getting Coronavirus. It can be explained that at the time this study was conducted, there were not many infected cases in the region, and therefore students were not living in the center of the pandemic. Their voting would be, of course, different from those working in medical staff (Urooj et al., 2020) or high levels of fear from those with underlying medical conditions (Guven et al., 2020; Colomer-Lahiguera et al., 2021). It contributes to explaining the discrepancies in people’s psychological responses in different situations. Moreover, the current study results, which were implemented on young adults aged 18–24, showed lower levels of fear than De Leo and Trabucchi (2020)’s results, which mainly surveyed fears of COVID-19 from the elderly. This helps hypothesize whether concerns about the COVID-19 increase with age, which will be a good premise for further research.

In addition, answers from the open-ended questions showed the two reasons students felt scared of the pandemic. Many explanations supported well for the quantitative results, like students were afraid of losing their lives and being positive with the Coronavirus. Another reason for their fears, being different from the FCV19 scale, was students’ fears of lateness in their graduation.

Regarding the high level of students’ online learning adaptability (M = 4.19, SD = 0.62), they almost recognized the importance of learning to face an acute and prolonged illness like the COVID-19. Diverse explanations were found on their high awareness about the pandemic and their strong belief in their local policies. Just following all demands from the state strictly, students confidently claimed that they could protect themselves and other people effectively. This research finding was compatible with Elsharkawy and Abdelaziz (2021) when testifying that “…more knowledge and certainty regarding COVID-19 will relieve students’ fears and worries about the disease and support their ability to adapt to any secondary effects in their lives.” Under VandenBos’s (2007) definition, Vietnamese students entirely had the capacity to make appropriate responses to changing situations.

The quantitative result from SEM displayed the fact that fears had little impact on students’ online learning adaptability. Specifically, the FCV19 scale explained 10.2% of its influence on students’ online learning adaptability. Therefore, the current study contributes to the literature another factor distracting students’ virtual education. Moreover, a significant different value-adding to this research context was that this study generated the additional four other kinds of fears emerging from the fears of COVID-19 pandemic (FCV19) that dominated students’ online learning adaptability, including (1) fears of wasting time and money for a shoddy online education, (2) fears of loneliness and laziness, (3) fears of distracting factors when learning online, and (4) fears of lacking the learning materials. This coincidence was compatible with Van and Thi (2021b) regarding factors hindering online learning in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. It can be proven that FCV19 can be seen as another hindrance factor that prevented Vietnamese learners from studying online in the current context. This was also similar to Rodríguez-Hidalgo et al. (2020) when students had to learn within the limit of learning resources.