On Campus and Online: Evaluating Student Engagement in the Covid-19 Era

This chapter discusses how student engagement in my classes changed in spring 2020 semester as a result of transitioning to remote learning in three undergraduate courses when the pandemic struck. As an experienced teacher at a liberal arts college, I drew on my past online work to engage some of the best practices during this important period, and both direct and indirect assessment results from my classes suggest that online platforms helped to improve or sustain learning process in the short term. While students prefer to learn in-person, they reported positively on some aspects of their virtual experience. Although the nature of the transition limits our ability to generalize these findings, the pandemic has given us a chance to think about our courses in a way that we have never done before. More specifically, it has presented an opportunity to ask whether traditional approaches are optimal choices for a given student-learning outcome and what are some of the complexities and potential side effects of online learning