The Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Student Participation in an Undergraduate Networking Course

The global COVID-19 pandemic resulted in education being shifted online, including in developing countries. Developing countries frequently have lower levels of Internet penetration than developed countries. Thus, one of the fears with the transition to online education was that students would be disenfranchised. At one university in a developing country the institution's learning management system (LMS) logs all user (students and faculty) activity. Using these logs we study how student activity in an undergraduate computer networking course has evolved in three offerings--two from the 2018/19 and 2019/20 academic years before the pandemic and the other from the 2020/21 year during the pandemic. The data show that the average number of LMS transactions per student went up during the COVID pandemic compared to the number prior to the pandemic. While this finding is not unexpected, given that students were being instructed online, other data from the logs points to some interesting trends. For example, there is a statistically significant difference in the number of clicks on embedded URLs within the LMS across the years. Other data show that students did not attend lectures or tutorials (discussion sections) as much as expected, and that the number of students "attending'' online class sessions declined over the course of the semester. We provide reasons for these trends.