Traditional to online over night ::hospitality student satisfaction during the first Covid-19 semester

Student satisfaction has been the focus of research projects gauging how students evaluate the higher education institution (HEI) on a program and course level. In traditional courses, student satisfaction revolves around the teacher, pedagogical style, and academic resources available. For fully online courses, students typically rate the experience based on four relationships: Learner-faculty, learner-learner, learner-content, and learner-technology. However, the spring semester of 2020 was neither traditional nor fully online; rather, it entailed an immediate and brutal shift from one learning mode to another. With Covid-19, faculty worldwide attempted to maintain the execution of their educational mission for their students and themselves. This paper investigates the factors impacting students’ satisfaction with their remote learning experience throughout the ‘forced’ confinement period in one HEI. Although initially communicated as a temporary closure in March 2020, this HEI Switzerland was obliged by the Swiss government to remain closed throughout the rest of the academic semester (i.e., 11 weeks). Unlike other Swiss HEIs that took weeks to move online, this HEI shifted to remote teaching over the weekend. In this unique setting, there was no break in the learning cycle for the students. Based on the literature, a 19-question survey conducted in June 2020 examined the relationships students have in three educational settings, i.e., learner-technology, learner-faculty, and learner-content, to the amount, accuracy, frequency, relevance, and timeliness of the messages communicated to students for these three categories. A total of 2254 Bachelor students from this Swiss HEI received this survey. The results from this study are critical to management and faculty as schools are currently preparing for the September intake in the midst of still uncertain covid-related times. This paper concludes with recommendations for creating future innovative ‘planned’ digitized courses programs that increase student satisfaction