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College students’ satisfaction dropped sharply after schools shifted to all-online courses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Undergraduate students struggled to stay motivated and missed receiving feedback from instructors and collaborating with fellow students. Significant numbers of students had problems with their internet connections, software, or computing devices—serious enough to impede their participation in their courses. Still, most students did not attribute their struggles to poor instructor preparation or limitations inherent in online learning. Moreover, online courses that used a larger array of recommended online teaching practices had much higher student satisfaction levels than the courses that used fewer of them. This report describes these and other results from Digital Promise’s national, random-sample survey of more than 1,000 college students whose coursework moved from in-person to completely online this spring.
