Online STEM College Courses During COVID

With funding from the National Science Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Digital Promise surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,000 undergraduates who were taking face-to-face courses that transitioned to remote delivery in spring 2020. Students reported being much less satisfied with their courses after the switch to remote instruction, with bigger drops for STEM courses. Maintaining motivation was the challenge students reported most frequently, with other challenges such as access to reliable broadband connections and conflicts with family responsibilities being more common for low-income students and Hispanic students than for others. The report of project findings in the Online Learning Journal won the OLC Outstanding Research Achievement Award for 2021.