The Transformation to an Online Course in Higher Education Results in Better Student Academic Performance

Abstract

Pandemic-forced remote teaching has highlighted the relevance of redesigning planification in order to transform face-to-face into online courses in higher education. Indeed, the type of e-learning activities, e-assessment and development of student-centred active learning tasks remains a challenge. In this work we investigated the academic performance of an online learning environment in a course with high number of enrolled students carried out in the pandemic context in 2020 and compared it to the 2019 face-to-face version of the course. The e-learning version of the course included some changes regarding the face-to-face to allow active student learning, digital learning environment, knowledge enforcement, and further exploitation of the available activities in the Moodle platform as for the face-to-face course, although the syllabus remained unchanged. This study finds both synchronous and asynchronous problem-solving based e-learning together with self-assessment and team-based continuous and individual questionnaire assessments to be valuable instructional methods that allowed higher student academic performance in comparison to the face-to-face academic student results. Furthermore, the academic performance was directly related to the student participation in both team-based and individual activities during the course, demonstrating that the adaptation of the face-to-face course to the e-learning environment was, at least, as efficient as the traditional course, despite student resistance to e-learning and e-assessment.