Surfing for Answers: Understanding How Universities in the United States Utilized Websites in Response to COVID-19

The onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic presented a unique global crisis that institutions of higher education were forced to engage with simultaneously. In this study, we provide insight into the use of websites by institutions in the United States (U.S.) during the pandemic. The sample for this study included public flagship universities within the U.S. and their institutional webpages focused on COVID-19 between January 2020 and April 2020. Guided by chaos theory (CT), we utilized a quantitative thematic analysis that involved the coding of institutional websites and public communications to develop a unique dataset capturing the information that institutions provided on campus websites (e.g., institutional decisions, timing of those decisions, public communications, and informational website structure). Findings indicated that all institutions in our sample engaged in moving to online instruction, implementing work-from-home policies, and canceling face-to-face events. In addition, we found variance in the accessibility and utility of websites.