Distance Learning at the Conventional Campus-based College

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, practically all colleges and universities in the United States shifted their conventional instructional mode of the in-person face-to-face classroom teaching to the virtual online instruction in the middle of the spring 2020 semester. While online-only institutions, majority of which are for-profit, eagerly promoted their online education, all of the conventional colleges and universities struggled to provide the necessary training for the instructional faculty and to assure students and their parents that the quality of their college education would not be compromised. In this research, we explored the impact of such quickly adopted online instruction as an inevitable alternative during the pandemic on the student learning as the pandemic placed them in a natural quasi field experimental condition. We found a significant difference in the student learning outcome recorded in the semester grade between the two periods: the difference is particularly prominent in non-participation or withdrawal from the learning process as reported in the grades of fails and withdrawals. Implications of the study for college and university enrollment and the compelling need for further study are discussed.