Abstract:

Student satisfaction has been the focus of research projects gauging how students evaluate the higher education institution (HEI) on a program and course level. In traditional courses, student satisfaction revolves around the teacher, pedagogical style, and academic resources available. For fully online courses, students typically rate the experience based on four relationships: Learner-faculty, learner-learner, learner-content, and learner-technology. However, the spring semester of 2020 was neither traditional nor fully online; rather, it entailed an immediate and brutal shift from one learning mode to another. In short, HEIs around the world were in crisis.

Nonetheless, crises have affected HEIs in the past. Many studies have been conducted on student satisfaction during crises such as school shootings, economic crises, or public health issues. Covid-19 is not the first public health issue to affect HEIs, but it is the most prevalent and far-reaching to date. Earlier epidemics such as SARS, Ebola, or Zika virus affected specific regions but did not result in campus closures for extended periods. The closest crisis was the Second World War, where HEIs, including the oldest hospitality management school, were forced to close their doors.

With Covid-19, faculty worldwide attempted to keep things as ‘normal’ as possible for their students and themselves. This paper investigates how one HEI kept things ‘normal’ by analyzing factors impacting students’ satisfaction with their remote learning experience throughout the ‘forced’ confinement period. Although initially communicated as a ‘temporary’ closure in March 2020, the oldest international hospitality management school in Switzerland was obliged by the Swiss government to remain closed throughout the rest of the academic semester (i.e., 11 weeks). Unlike other Swiss HEIs that took weeks to move online, this HEI shifted online over the weekend. There was no break in the learning cycle for the students.

Based on the literature, a 19-question survey conducted in June 2020 examined the relationships students have in three educational settings, i.e., learner-technology, learner-faculty, and learner-content, to the amount, accuracy, frequency, relevance, and timeliness of the messages communicated to students for these three categories. A total of 2254 Bachelor students from this Swiss HEI responded to this survey.

Based on a partial least square analysis, the initial results (2.25 out of 4) for general satisfaction showed that students did not find the online courses to be as effective as face-to-face courses, did not feel they learned as much as in the traditional classroom and did not feel the online setting fully meets their learning needs. For overall satisfaction level, students reported receiving feedback on assignments from the teacher was the most relevant. In parallel, all dimensions together (course information, feedback on assignments, information on technology, etc.) explain 35.3% of student satisfaction. Further, class size impacted significantly and negatively student satisfaction. Even in a remote format, small classes (e.g., less than 25 students) report higher student satisfaction than large classes.

The results from this study are critical to management and faculty as schools are currently preparing for the September intake. This paper concludes with recommendations for creating future innovative ‘planned’ digitized courses programs that increase student satisfaction.

Keywords:

COVID-19, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), student satisfaction, learner-technology, learner-faculty, learner-content.