Online vs. Face-to-Face: What do Nursing Students Prefer and Perceive?

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted teaching in a variety of institutions. It has tested the readiness of academic institutions to deal with such crisis. In order to lessen the impact of lockdown, educators are delivering excellent education through multiple online channels, which is a paradigm change. This change requires a better understanding of how students perceive and respond to online learning in comparison to face-to-face learning, as student perception and preference are critical to teaching, as well as how to apply these approaches most effectively to improve teaching learning methods. Therefore, this study was taken up with the objective to assess the perception and preference of nursing students towards online classes vs. face-to-face classes. This descriptive study was conducted on 113 B.Sc. and M.Sc. Nursing students from P.D. Hinduja College of Nursing, Mumbai, after taking informed consent and permission from higher authorities. A structured questionnaire through Google form was used to collect data. Out of 113 majority of the students, i.e. 69 (61.1%) strongly felt that learning is better in face-to-face classes while only 1 (0.9%) student strongly disagreed to it. Out of 113, 108 (95.6%) students preferred face-to-face class for in-depth understanding of lesson. 107 (94.7%) preferred face-to-face class for attention span. 108 (95.6%) students believe social interaction with peer groups is better in face-to-face class. 102 (90.3%) preferred face-to-face class for clarification of doubts. Overall students preferred face-to-face classes over online class. Thus, it was concluded that, students felt comfortable to learn in offline mode of class, as they could interact with their teachers and also be able to give 100% of involvement to the class without any interruption like network issues, unsuitable surrounding