Online Learning in the Time of COVID-19: Students' Social, Cultural, and Virtual Realities

• In Event: Higher Education and Learning in the COVID-19 Context

Abstract

This study increased understanding of undergraduate and graduate students’ academic, social and emotional experiences with virtual instruction at a Midwestern metropolitan university during the early months of COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders. Quantitative and qualitative survey data (pilot N=20; actual N=@2000) were analyzed through a reality pedagogy framework. Students perceived instructors to be somewhat effective in handling the shift to an online course format; cognizant of problems students encountered, especially technological; and often flexible with deadlines. However, students reported faculty to seem less likely to understand familial and work demands than illness; unsympathetic to students’ anxieties; and, in the case of minority and first generation participants, not apt to acknowledge racial inequities.

Authors

• Lynne Hamer, University of Toledo

• Revathy Kumar, University of Toledo

• Mingyang Liu, University of Toledo

• Pierrette Widemeyer, University of Toledo