The sudden impact of the COVID-19 pandemic challenged universities to provide students with online teaching and learning settings that were both immediately applicable and supportive of quality learning. This resulted in a broad variety of synchronous and asynchronous online settings of teaching and learning. While some courses balanced both kinds, others offered either predominantly synchronous or asynchronous teaching and learning. In a survey study with students (N=3,056) and teachers (N=396) from a large German university, we explored whether a predominance of synchronous or asynchronous teaching and learning settings in higher education was associated with certain student experiences and outcomes. Additionally, we examined how well these two types of teaching and learning settings support students’ basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness proposed by self-determination theory (SDT). Data were collected after the first online semester due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The results imply that from the students’ perspective, the teaching methods involved in the two settings of teaching and learning differ with regard to their potential to support social interaction and to support basic psychological needs as proposed by SDT. Students who studied mostly in synchronous settings reported more peer-centered activities such as feedback in comparison to students in mostly asynchronous settings. In contrast, teachers perceived fewer differences between teaching methods in synchronous and asynchronous settings, especially regarding feedback activities. Further, students in mostly synchronous settings reported greater support of their basic psychological needs for competence support and relatedness as well as a greater overall satisfaction with the online term compared to students in mostly asynchronous settings. Across all students, greater fulfillment of psychological needs and higher technology acceptance coincided with outcomes that are more favorable. Implications for the post-pandemic classroom are drawn.

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Peer interaction and collaborative learning activities are integral to studying at university in Germany today: Often, students are required to organize themselves in study groups to prepare coursework. In addition to face-to-face interaction in these study groups, a large part of students' collaborative learning activities and communication processes takes place virtually via e-mail, online forums, chat rooms, and so on (e.g., Hinkle, 2002) as computer-mediated communication (CMC) is a highly effective and economical way to share information and work cooperatively on common projects. With the ever-increasing importance of virtual communication and virtual learning environments in higher education, a strong development towards universities' internationalization can be observed. A growing number of students pursue degrees, or complete parts of their studies, abroad. In 2013, the number of

In this study the relationship between intended course objectives and teaching effectiveness was investigated. Teaching effectiveness was indexed through student evaluations of teaching (SETs) and lecturer self-evaluations (LSEs), with a focus on course evaluation. Rated learning of intended course objectives was derived by two parallel questionnaires administered to 1647 students and 84 lecturers in 84 psychology courses. In particular, lecturers rated the importance of 11 course objectives for their course, while students rated their perceived achievement throughout the course according to the same 11 course objectives. Corresponding importance and achievement ratings were used to calculate separate measures of students' achievement of intended and unintended course objectives. Results show that students' perceived achievement of intended course objectives was associated with better SETs and LSEs. No association with SETs or LSEs were found for students' perceived achievement of unintended course objectives. These findings support the importance of having clear course objectives for effective student learning.