It's About Time: An Analysis of Student Activities Under Remote Learning

Numerous surveys, both internal and external, have indicated that many students are struggling with time management under COVID-19 conditions, and that their normal pattern of activities, such as sleep, exercise, and studying, have been disrupted. Even prior to the pandemic, each of these factors (e.g. sleep, exercise, and studying) have been identified as critical for student success, yet, to date, there are no studies that address the shifts in student time allocation that may have taken place under the current, unprecedented conditions of remote learning. For this IRB-approved study, we collected evidence of how students are allocating their time (e.g. what activities and for what duration), using online time diaries completed by students enrolled in several online (synchronous and asynchronous) undergraduate engineering courses. The present study builds on previous studies that analyzed the nexus between student activity patterns (e.g. sleep, studying, exercise, eating) and learning to ascertain changes in these patterns that have occurred under the new pedagogical (and broader global) conditions. Our findings are intended to inform human-centered course design, to optimize student well-being, and - by extension - learning under the conditions of remote/multi-modal learning and beyond.