Teaching Professional Skills During the Pandemic: Does Delivery Mode Matter?

Abstract

The current study explores how the transition to online course delivery during the pandemic impacted a professional skills course which incorporates a variety of in-class and out of class experiential learning activities. In this paper, we compare student performance on a resume writing assignment, a LinkedIn profile creation assignment, a mock interview with members of local businesses and overall class scores during Fall 2019 when the professional skills course was delivered face-to-face with student performance during Fall 2020 when the course was delivered online. We explore whether the effect of delivery mode varied as a function of student sex, race and first-generation college status. Our results indicate that there were some significant differences in student performance across the two semesters. Students performed better on the resume and LinkedIn assignments when the course was delivered online. There was no difference in mock interview performance across the two class delivery modes. Students taking the online version of the course in Fall 2020 did significantly worse in the course overall than students taking the face-to-face version of the course in Fall 2019. Despite concerns that women, racial minorities and first-generation students could suffer disproportionately in the online version of the course, the relationship between class delivery mode and student performance did not vary as a function of these student characteristics. This underscores the importance of future research which can help to identify changes that can be made to online courses to assist students.