When the 2020 semester began in the USA in January, it was unimaginable that the near-total closure of educational system across the globe would become the new normal. To mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 virus, teaching faculty hastily converted to an online learning environment in order for instruction to continue. This mixed-methods study used the What Is Happening In this Class? (WIHIC) questionnaire and analysis of student course evaluations to explore changes in student perceptions of learning environments from before to after the switch to remote learning because of the pandemic. Students perceived a statistically-significant decline in student cohesiveness, teacher support, involvement, task orientation and equity, with the largest decline of 0.56 standard deviations occurring for student cohesiveness. Qualitative comments illuminated reasons for these declines and suggested ways to mitigate declines in the future.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.