Student Preference: ONLINE or Face-To-Face Instruction in a Year of COVID-19

This full paper, in the research to practice category, focuses on student preferences for online versus face-to-face instruction. Spring Semester, 2020 started as usual but proved to be anything but usual. Instead, in a seven-day turnaround, the first-year engineering program at Michigan Technological University moved from a face-to-face, highly interactive studio environment to a remote/synchronous environment. At the end of the semester, our University and many others across the United States conducted a short survey of undergraduate students on their preference of face-to-face versus online instruction. Results showed a strong preference for face-to-face instruction. However, to adequately consider the extensive ranges of approach in both umbrella terms ("face-to-face instruction" and "online instruction"), we need to unpack the surface results. This paper reports on a short survey given to second-semester students in our College of Engineering, First-Year Engineering Program, and students in the first-year course in Systems Engineering. The survey sought to gather student preferences for two variations of our instructional models in current use in our first-year program: (a) remote/synchronous instruction versus (b) a hybrid environment that included faceto- face instruction with mandatory masking and social distancing. Results showed that students, at worst, held preferences that were generally not statistically different in terms of preferences. The several exceptions that did show significance showed numerical differences that were not of practical importance, with one exception. The core takeaway from our study is that determining student preferences for "face-to-face instruction" versus "distance learning" needs to be unpacked to enable students to register reasoned judgments and set the stage for meaningful results.