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
ABSTRACT
Adherence to sustainable development in higher education rests on the assessment of students' academic attainment, especially during unexpected environmental changes, such as the sudden move from face-to-face to online courses during the recent pandemic. Most studies devoted to this issue have compared students' performance online with that of face-to-face courses before the pandemic, tallying together a variety of courses, often from specific disciplines. Besides their mixed results and generality, such studies do not address the issue of students' adjustment to the post-pandemic learning environment. The present retrospective case study offered a simple evidence-based model for educators to measure the relationship between environmental changes and students' behavior for self-reflection and adjustment. It examined students' academic attainment (as measured by grades) within a broader timeframe, including courses taught by the same instructors face-to-face before and after the pandemic and online during the pandemic. Specific courses of the general education curriculum were selected to include a broad spectrum of students. The study then assessed whether students' activities before, during, and after the pandemic predicted summative assessment performance (i.e., final exam grades) differently. In this study, performance differences were recorded, usually in favor of post-pandemic face-to-face classes. Midterm examinations were the best predictors of final exam grades irrespective of the modality of instruction and timeframe. Implications and applications of the methodology used and the results obtained were considered.