A Year After the Outbreak of COVID-19: How Has Evolved the Students' Perception on the Online Learning?

During the last year students have been exposed to a continuous evolution of the learning processes (fully online, blended, parallel blended, rotation of the face-to-face activities, etc.) and, often, to a lot of different technologies, with only one common denominator: the carrying out of the educational activities. Despite the peculiarity of the pandemic situation, one year is a time long enough to analyze the evolution of the students’ perceptions and understand if could be put in relation with a possible start-up of processes of technology innovation and/or acceptance. In this article, we present the outcomes of an investigation conducted by means of an online survey at almost one year distance from the first one that involved, like this time, the students of the bachelor course in Educational Science of the University of Tor Vergata: this year 159 students (98% women). We have been able to explore the relevance of many categories of factors: intrinsic to the characteristics of the learning ecosystems, personal, contextual, related to the educational activities, perceived values of the technology-based processes. It appears that the main causal chain moves from the characteristics of the learning ecosystem, toward the impressions about the learning activities and their effectiveness to, finally, the future intentions and expectations. Not very relevant appear to be individual and contextual factors. The overall impressions of the students about the online activities seem to be positive but personal setting (equipment and connectivity) appear to be more effective than that provided by the university, possibly to underline criticalities met with the delivering of parallel blended activities. In addition, students deem very importantly the collaboration/interaction among peers and with the teachers and, as well, collaborative and design activities, while, on the contrary, most of the implemented learning activities seem to have a transmissive nature. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.