Evaluating Pre and Post COVID-19 Learning: An Empirical Study of Learners' Perception in Higher Education

The COVID-19 pandemic has struck education system around the globe. The pandemic initiated an immediate and complete lockdown of all the educational institutions, to keep social distancing. According to healthcare professionals, lockdown and social distancing could help to flatten the infection curve and reduce total fatalities from the COVID-19 pandemic. It has affected more than 90% of the world's learners, as the regular learning approaches are not appropriate in this out of the ordinary times and online learning seems to have become a critical salvation for learning, the educational institutions attempt to minimize the community spread of the disease. All the people participating in the education system accepted that teaching and learning methods need to be altered in the period of COVID-19 as the situation led to forced adaptation of e-learning methods. This paper investigates and evaluates the learners' perception in a higher education institution of India and compares the difference in the perception of the same students in Pre and Post COVID- 19 period, using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences program (SPSS) version 23.0 and JASP 0.14.1 software applications for descriptive and analytical statistics i.e. medium, minimum, maximum, paired t-test and correlation. The result of this papers confirmed that there exists a statistically significant difference in the students' perception towards the Pre-Pandemic and Post-Pandemic learning methods, which indicates that students have a higher perception of the Pre-Pandemic learning blended learning, than that of the Post Pandemic learning web-assisted learning.