Surviving and thriving: How changes in teaching modalities influenced student satisfaction before, during and after COVID-19

Abstract

This paper leverages analytics methods to investigate the impact of changes in teaching modalities shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic on undergraduate students’ satisfaction within a Spanish brick-and-mortar higher education institution. Unlike research that has focused on faculty- or programme-level data, this study offers a comprehensive institutional perspective by analysing large-scale data (N = 83,532) gathered from satisfaction surveys across all undergraduate courses in eight faculties from 2018 to 2021. The longitudinal analysis revealed significant changes (p < 0.05) in satisfaction indicators, particularly overall satisfaction and perceived workload. During the emergency remote teaching period, there was a significant decrease in satisfaction and high levels of variability across courses. However, a year after emergency remote teaching, with increased implementations of technology-supported online and mixed teaching modalities, satisfaction measures not only recovered but exceeded pre-COVID levels in the aforementioned indicators when the teaching modality was fully co-located. The variability of answers also reached historical lows, reflecting more uniform student experiences. These findings highlight the resilience of educators and the current higher education system and suggest a capacity to learn and improve from disruptive pedagogical changes. The study also provides insights into how data analytics can help monitor and inform the evolution of teaching practices. Implications for practice or policy Higher education institution administrators should improve the understanding of the effects derived from changes in their teaching and learning models, for example, in teaching modalities and related technology support. Student satisfaction data analytics offer useful indicators to study the impact of those effects. Higher education institutions should provide support for educators to ensure minimal deviations from expected averages of educational quality indicators regardless of the educators’ capacity to adapt to changes in the teaching models.