Learning during COVID-19: (Too) Isolated yet Successful

Florian Berens^1,2,3*Sebastian Hobert^3,4,5

• ¹Hector Research Institute of Education Sciences and Psychology, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
• ²Center of Methods in Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany
• ³Campus Institute Data Science, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany
• ⁴Chair of Application Systems and E-Business, University of Goettingen, Göttingen, Germany
• ⁵TH Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany

In a world changed by the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020 universities had to completely rethink and immediately transform their teaching to a fully online setting. As a result, students had to learn from home and organize their learning by themselves. In a natural experiment, data about learning processes indicate that students learned more engaged and achieved higher learning success in this new situation compared to the traditional learning process. However, the students experienced a three-fold isolation: (1) physical isolation, (2) social isolation, and (3) learning isolation, which resulted in a stressful learning experience. In conclusion, these affective challenges indicate that this exceptional learning setting should not be normalized, even though positive outcomes were achieved during COVID-19. Beyond the situation in the pandemic, it can be deduced that students who learn at a distance need additional support to not (only) learn in isolation.