Assessing the Influence of Online Learning Strategies on Academic Performance: Advantages, Disadvantages, and Implications

Abstract

Higher education institutions have shifted from traditional face to face to online teaching due to Corona virus pandemic which has forced both teachers and students to be put in a compulsory lockdown. However the online teaching/learning constitutes a serious challenge that both university teachers and students have to face, as it necessarily requires the adoption of different new teaching/learning strategies to attain effective academic outcomes, imposing a virtual learning world which involves from the student’s part an online access to lectures and information, and on the teacher’s side the adoption of a new teaching approach to deliver the curriculum content, new means of evaluation of student’s personal skills and learning experience. This chapter explores and assesses the online teaching and learning impact on student’s academic achievement, encompassing the passing in review the adoption of students’ research strategies, the focus of the student’s main source of information viz. library online consultation and the collaboration with their peers. To reach this end, descriptive and parametric analyses are conducted in order to identify the impact of these new factors on student’s academic performance. The findings of the study shows that to what extent the student’s online learning has or has not led to any remarkable improvements in the students’ academic achievements and, whether or not, to any substantial changes in their e-learning competence.