The COVID-19 pandemic entailed a sudden and compulsory shift from face-to-face to online teaching and learning. Higher education was no exception. International literature indicates the ways in which different institutions responded to the challenges and demands arising from the need to teach and learn in an online scenario (see, for instance, Quezada et al., 2020; Flores & Gago, 2020).

Existing literature points to several challenges in dealing with teaching and learning online. Issues of anxiety and stress caused by changes in teaching methods (Xavier et al., 2020; Son et al., 2020) and the need for preparation and training to deal with learning platforms (Lim, 2020) have been reported.

A key challenge facing both teachers and students concerns assessment in online teaching and learning. Difficulties involving failure to adapt to the new assessment formats (Gonzalez et al., 2020) and in assessing practical knowledge (OECD, 2020) have been identified. In addition, there are perceptions of unfairness (Flores et al., 2021) and difficulties relating to academic dishonesty (Guangul et al., 2020).

Overall, personal and institutional factors explain different processes of adaptation when it comes to students’ individual characteristics but there are also issues of support and guidance in the online environment (Flores et al., 2021b). One of the features reported in existing empirical research concerns the need to investigate feedback in remote assessment in higher education, with particular regard to its benefits and drawbacks (Hast, 2021). Fuller et al. (2020) assert that COVID-19 entailed “a real opportunity to explore different assessment for learning (AfL) designs. As low stakes assessments focused on providing actionable feedback to learners, they can also be of significant value in generating data to inform faculty and curriculum planners” (p. 782).

Existing research reports on the benefits of online feedback, recommending it in higher education situations where students may be learning remotely (Bridge & Appleyard, 2008) and access to feedback is considered easy (Hast & Healy, 2018) and an immediate process (Grieve et al., 2016).

If feedback is to be effective it must be timely and relevant (Ramsden, 2003), prospective (Sendziuk, 2010), suitable to the context (Knight & Yorke, 2003) and recognized by both students and teachers (Orsmond et al., 2005). In an online context, the effectiveness of feedback may be related to time management in online learning (Rasiah et al., 2020) and to communication mechanisms (Hatziapostolou & Paraskakis, 2010).

As such, analyzing the extent to which feedback is associated with the way university students manage online learning along with their perceived difficulties seems relevant and timely in a context marked by a global and compulsory shift from face-to-face to online teaching and learning in higher education.

In this paper the following research questions are addressed:

Q1. What kinds of difficulties did higher education students experience in the shift from face-to-face to online learning?

Q2. How did they perceive the feedback received during the first lockdown?

Q3. Was teacher feedback associated with how university students managed online learning and felt difficulty in this context? 

Hypotheses

H1: The feedback university students received from their teachers has a direct effect on the difficulties they felt in online learning.

 H2: The feedback university students received from their teachers has a direct effect on their management of online learning.

 H3: The feedback university students received from their teachers has an indirect effect on the difficulties they felt through their management of online learning.

A self-report measure was used as it offered information about the subjective experiences of participants regarding their online learning. In addition to the students' biographical data, an open-ended questionnaire was included, which addressed three issues, (1)perceptions and experiences about perceived difficulties in online teaching and learning (How did the students adapt to the closure of the university and what difficulties did they experience?); (2)perceptions and experiences about their management of online learning (What were the students experiences of online learning?) and, (3)perceptions and experiences about feedback received (What kind of feedback did the students receive and when did it occur?). Perceived Feedback in Online Learning (PFOL) is a 6-item instrument created for this study that asks participants to indicate on a Likert-type scale from 1(totally disagree) to 5(totally agree) to what extent they agreed with a series of statements about feedback, considering their online learning experience. Perceived Difficulty with Online Learning (PDOL) is an 8-item instrument created for this study that asks participants to mark on a Likert-type scale from 1(no difficulty) to 5(a lot of difficulty) the degree of difficulty they felt in online learning. Managing Distance Learning in Higher Education (MOLHE) is a 7-item instrument created for this study that asks participants to indicate on a Likert-type scale from 1(totally agree) to 5(totally disagree) how they managed online learning. A link to the survey was created through Qualtrics and sent out to the participants via their respective students’ unions. Students from all subject areas (including Social Sciences, Engineering and Technology, and Health Sciences) and from all cycles of study were invited. The instruments were delivered online and completed individually by each participant. The research project was carried out according to the ethical principles of international educational research, namely data confidentiality, informed consent, voluntary participation, and the use of data collected only for research purposes. The project was approved by the Ethics Committee for Research in Social and Human Sciences at the University of Minho (Ref.ªCEICSH 057/2020). Participants were informed about the goals of the project prior to giving their consent. Data collected through the open-ended questions were analysed using content analysis of emergent categories, based on the semantic criterion. To ensure accuracy of the analysis, ‘verification’ strategies (Creswell,1998) were implemented, namely member checking (Doyle,2007) by the researchers and co-authors in order to triangulate data interpretation by the researchers and co-authors in order to triangulate data interpretation.

The study points to clear connections between university students’ perceptions about feedback, their perceived difficulties, and their capacity to manage online learning during the first lockdown in 2020. Results confirmed the first and second hypotheses of the third research question: the feedback university students received from their teachers has a direct effect on the difficulties they felt in online learning and the feedback university students received from their teachers has a direct effect on their management of online learning. Students’ perceived feedback had a negative direct effect on the difficulties they reported, whereas it had a positive direct effect on how they managed online learning. The feedback received from their teachers has a direct effect on the difficulties they felt with online learning. Furthermore, the feedback university students received from their teachers has a direct effect on their management of online learning. Findings suggest that if students are provided with feedback, self-regulation of learning may be enhanced and, as a result, better adaptation to online teaching and learning. Previous literature suggests that feedback influences students’ future work and their learning strategies (Winstone & Boud, 2020) and that in an online environment students tend to use more often self-regulated learning strategies than blended students (Broadbent, 2017). These results may also be linked to the trend of assessment feedback being increasingly provided online (Evans, 2013) meaning that students are more adapted to this process. The analysis resulting from the qualitative data shows how students experienced online education, in particular, the difficulties encountered and how feedback was useful in managing these difficulties. The overall results point to the need to develop feedback strategies aimed at addressing the difficulties experienced and the way students manage online learning.

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