Abstract
The use of the Internet to develop new technologies has generated a considerable change in teaching and student learning in higher education. The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has forced universities to switch from face-to-face to online instruction. Furthermore, this transfer process was planned and executed quickly, with urgent redesigns of courses originally conceived for live teaching. The aim of this work is to measure the service quality of online teaching delivered during the COVID-19 period. The methodology was based on an importance-performance analysis using a structural equations model. The data were obtained from a sample of 467 students attending a university in southern Spain. The results reveal five priority attributes of online teaching that need to be improved in order to enhance the service quality of the virtual instruction provided to students. Universities need to redefine their online format by integrating methodological and technological decisions and involving collaboration between teachers, students and administration staff and services. The results do not apply to educational institutions that exclusively teach courses online, but to those institutions that had to rapidly adapt, and shift course material originally designed for face-to-face training.
Highlights
This work emphasizes the enormous efforts made by educational institutions to transform content, activities and assessment systems designed for face-to-face teaching to online formats
The results of this study show a general dissatisfaction among students with many of the features of online teaching that have become apparent in the period of lockdown in Spain due to COVID-19
The results do not apply to educational institutions that exclusively teach courses online, but to those institutions that had to adapt quickly, and shift course material originally designed for face-to-face instruction to the online format without enough time to carry out a more thorough process of adaptation
Summary
The higher education sector is currently facing new challenges that had never previously experienced, arising from sharper global competitiveness, advances in technology and the rise in the numbers of universities that offer students an ever-broader range of courses to choose from. This has led universities and higher education centers to ponder how they can improve the service quality they offer their students. The use of Internet in education, especially in higher education, has generated considerable change in the way in which learning takes place. With the substantial growth in demand for e-learning, further research is needed on the factors that influence the adoption of this form of instruction [3]
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