ABSTRACT
The global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in countless changes to daily life. This has included the move to emergency remote learning for PreK-12 and post-secondary education around the world. The impact of COVID-19 resulted in extensive periods of emergency synchronous teaching and learning, with the distinctive rise of e-learning, whereby teaching is undertaken remotely and on digital platforms. Many institutions adjusted their traditional instructional format to synchronous online instruction in early Spring, 2020 semester. To better understand the impact of transformative modes of instructions on the learning process and to investigate factors that may affect the effectiveness of synchronous online instruction and serve as input to instructional process improvements in the future, surveys were conducted in three phases: phase I: during the second and third week after all F2F courses were transformed to synchronous online instruction in March, 2020;phase II: during the last week of the Spring semester 2020;and phase III: in the middle of Spring, 2021 semester. The surveys set out to measure students' perceived satisfaction and effectiveness of synchronous learning experiences and to capture the underlying factors that contribute to the perceived satisfaction levels as they gained more experiences with the synchronous online learning process. The results show students overwhelmingly prefer being in a physical classroom when they first transformed to synchronous instruction mode in Spring, 2020. However, after one year's practice with the synchronous online instruction, almost all dimensions observed in this study have been changed significantly, including satisfaction with the synchronous online instruction, perceived grade, interaction, comprehension of learning contents, engagement and perceived learning outcomes. © 2022 International Association for Computer Information Systems