Do zoom meetings really help? A comparative analysis of synchronous and asynchronous online learning during Covid‐19 pandemic.

Background: Online learning and teaching were globally popularized due to the impact of Covid‐19. The pandemic has made both synchronous and asynchronous online learning inevitable in regions privileged with the technological affordance. Aims: This study was designed to examine and compare the effectiveness of both learning modes through the Community of Inquiry framework. Materials & Methods: Comparative analyses on a sample of N = 170 undergraduate students who took both synchronous and asynchronous online courses in Spring 2021. Results: The paired‐sample T‐tests results indicated a significant difference in social presence, cognitive presence and self‐evaluated performance. Discussion & Conclusion: Teaching presence significantly influenced social presence and cognitive presence in both learning modes. However, under synchronous learning mode, social presence significantly impacted self‐evaluation, grades and school identification. While social presence only influenced school identification under asynchronous learning mode. Theoretical and practical implications were also included. Lay Description: This paper is particularly informative as a comparative study, because we sampled students who had both synchronous online courses and asynchronous online courses in the Spring 2021 semester. And we only compared students' experiences within themselves using paired‐sample T‐tests, meaning that we compared the learning experience of the same person under two learning modes, rather than compare two samples.Although synchronous learning and asynchronous learning are both online learning methods, students had significant different experience in social presence and cognitive presence in the two learning modes, and had significantly higher self‐evaluated performance in synchronous learning mode. They learned in a more socially engaged and cognitively engaged way in synchronous online courses.Through structural equation modelling tests, we found that social presence was the most important factor in synchronous online courses. It impacts students' self‐evaluation, grades, and identification to their attended schools. However, in asynchronous learning mode, teaching presence was the most important factor.What is particularly interesting is that social presence leads to lower self‐evaluated performance, but higher grades in synchronous learning environment. Students might dislike the fact that they had to talk and discuss in online courses just like in face‐to‐face courses and they'd rather sit back and do the assignment without synchronous instructions. But, they do better without social interactions in synchronous class meetings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]