Belonging in distance learning: The impact of interaction during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a unique situation in which higher education institutions, teachers, researchers, and students prove their ability to continue education online. In a longitudinal panel study at a German university, we investigated how freshmen and students in higher semesters (n = 72) cope with the online winter semester 2020/21. Commonly, a sense of belonging to a university is highly determined by academic and social engagement and positively impacts academic success and motivation. Due to the pandemic, the interaction between students, lecturers, and learning materials was limited to digital communication. The results reveal that interaction (student-to-content, student-to-staff, and student-to-student) hardly correlates with a sense of belonging, whereas correlations between interaction and academic success as well as motivation.