The rapid transition from campus to online teaching–how are students’ perception of learning experiences affected?

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a global disruption to higher education, especially in engineering education, where many teaching and learning activities are difficult or impossible to conduct online. This study examines the changes in the students’ experiences of this disruption using a 26-item process-oriented course experience questionnaire (CEQ) that was already in use in the Faculty of Engineering at Lund University (LTH), rather than a newly created pandemic questionnaire. This allowed results from spring 2020 to be compared with corresponding data for 2017–2019. Overall, the students expressed lower satisfaction with their courses, indicated they received less feedback and fewer valuable comments, and found it harder to understand the expectations and standards of work. On the positive side, students reported that assessment was less about facts and more about in-depth understanding. By gender, male students were overall more negative to the experience of online learning, whereas female students appeared better able to benefit from the shift to online learning. Our results show the great advantage of using a robust course evaluation system that focuses on students’ learning experience rather than satisfaction, and suggest a way of being prepared to systematically study the effects of possible future disruptions to higher education.