Comprehensive Report on Early COVID Impact

The COVID-19 pandemic that started on the Spring of 2020 posed a considerable challenge for college students and educators. The lockdown that took place after Spring Recess of that year demanded urgent adjustments in instruction as well as instructional methods. The sudden shift, from in-person to online teaching, required the immediate use of asynchronous learning to guarantee effective communication between students, faculty and the administration. While new initiatives emerged as possible solutions to the crisis, the issue of whether they actually allowed students to accomplish their educational expectations became an important question. This study summarizes the results of a research work which main purpose was to measure the degree to which students felt cared about during instruction before and after the pandemic, before and after online teaching. The results are evident as it becomes clear that, despite qualitative accounts of feeling cared about, online teaching does quantitatively decrease the perception students have about been cared about by their professor. Both, the quantitative and qualitative data sets have been important in understanding the broad general points of my research as well as the details and depth associated with two very different instructional methods and sets of circumstances. [For the full proceedings, see ED656038.]