Contrasting the experiences of university students in two educational scenarios: online teaching vs. emergency remote teaching

The objective of these work was to explore the experiences of university students about the instructional action in an online teaching setting, before Covid-19, and in emergency remote teaching setting, during the pandemic. For this, a cross sectional-correlational study with non-probabilistic sampling of voluntary participants was carried out; the sample consisted of 301 students enrolled in a Mexican university. To contrast the experiences of the students in the two scenarios, a self-applied Likert-type questionnaire was used, composed of 24 items (Cronbach's alpha internal consistency coefficient of .968, correlations greater than .30 in all items); the analysis procedure involved two complementary routes: calculating percentage frequencies and in addition Student's t test was applied for related samples. It was found that the means were higher for the online teaching scenario compared to the emergency remote teaching scenario, although statistically significant differences were only found regarding the instructional design, the evaluation of learning and the participation of students in the subjects. The results also reveal a couple of methodological limitations and, at the same time, a set of questions that open future lines of work.