The rapid transition from campus to online teaching – how are students’ perception of learning experiences affected?

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a global disruption to higher education, especially in engineering education, where many teaching and learning activities are difficult or impossible to conduct online. This study examines the changes in the students' experiences of this disruption using a 26-item process-oriented course experience questionnaire (CEQ) that was already in use in the Faculty of Engineering at Lund University (LTH), rather than a newly created pandemic questionnaire. This allowed results from spring 2020 to be compared with corresponding data for 2017-2019. Overall, the students expressed lower satisfaction with their courses, indicated they received less feedback and fewer valuable comments, and found it harder to understand the expectations and standards of work. On the positive side, students reported that assessment was less about facts and more about in-depth understanding. By gender, male students were overall more negative to the experience of online learning, whereas female students appeared better able to benefit from the shift to online learning. Our results show the great advantage of using a robust course evaluation system that focuses on students' learning experience rather than satisfaction, and suggest a way of being prepared to systematically study the effects of possible future disruptions to higher education.

“It has worked well despite the circumstances” – a study on student social relations and well-being during the pandemic

“…Regarding cooperation with other students, there was a tendency for association for gender and cooperation, as a larger share of male students (73 %) found that the cooperation with other students was worse when teaching took place online than when it took place on campus as compared to 55% of the female students. The result was marginally significant with a p-value of .072, confirming a trend seen in a previous study of Course Experience Questionnaire results at LTH from spring term in 2020 (Warfvinge et al, 2021). Note: * p-value: .072; student descriptions of their well-being and cooperation with other students were coded as qualitative variables as: Worse = 1, Same/better = 2.…”

“…Research on effects from the pandemic in a campus environment has shown that students during the pandemic struggled to orient themselves in courses and to find motivation to study (Warfvinge et al, 2021). Such signals surface also in our material.…”

“…Subsequent negative effects on students' well-being have been reported (Elmer et al, 2020;Husky et al, 2020;Savage et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2020Wang et al, /2021. Furthermore, students report on decreased motivation, and problems related to structuring information about courses and dealing with feedback (Warfvinge et al, 2021). It is against the backdrop of such findings, that this study investigates effects on students' study related networks.…”

“…Thus, even though study discipline comes across as crucial, it is unclear how interaction with others influence study outcome. It might be that different students rely on networks in different ways, something that may explain the variation in the literature (for example Elmer et al, 2020;Warfvinge et al, 2021). In this study we will include a sample of commuter students to see whether they are affected by the pandemic in the same way as campus students.…”

An Evidence-Based Study on Teaching Computer Aided Design in Higher Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…On the other hand, students from online courses were more prone to engage in quantitative reasoning. Warfvinge et al [3] point out that Swedish students seem less satisfied and that they receive less feedback from the teachers during the online teaching. Gonzalez et al [4] on the other hand showed in a Spanish study that the students adapted well to the new online learning and increased their study efficiency and that there was a positive effect from the online education on student learning.…”