Student perceptions of online learning

Friday, February 18, 2022

The return to campus hallways and classrooms is an opportunity to reflect on and understand how students, particularly first-year students, experienced online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. In an open access paper, Jennifer Howcroft, Lecturer and Kate Mercer, Librarian and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Systems Design Engineering analyzed student course surveys to better understand how first-year engineering students felt about the transition to and experience of online learning.

online learning
Students identified a mix of positive and negative perceptions of online learning which stayed relatively consistent across their first semester of online learning. Some of the benefits included self-paced learning, greater personal agency, and an opportunity to improve lifelong learning skills like self-regulation, organization, and time management. Among the challenges were a perceived increase in course workload, fears of missing content or deadlines, managing courses across multiple online platforms, and reduced opportunities for social connections. Interestingly, some of the identified negative perceptions persisted even when the concerns or challenges were not realized suggesting that some of the negative perceptions of online learning were “grounded in the fear of the unknown”.

The analysis suggests that the online learning experience could be improved by fostering communication and collaboration among students, integrating a growth mindset into course activities, and creating a strong learning partnership between the teaching team and students.

Jennifer Howcroft and Kate Mercer hope to continue this work of understanding student perceptions of online learning experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic with a focus on upper-year engineering students.

“What if my Wi-Fi crashes during an exam?”: First-year engineering student perceptions of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic was recently published in the European Journal and Engineering Education.