Online Education and Undergraduates’ Academic Record during the COVID-19 Pandemic in China: Evidence from Large-Scale Data

Digital technology-based online education is key to promoting high-quality development of higher education. Many studies have analyzed the effects of online education during the COVID-19 pandemic, but analyses based on large-scale data are lacking. This study uses a quasi-natural experiment during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore the short- and long-term relationships between emergency remote education (teaching and learning) and undergraduates’ academic record using multiple comparison analysis of variance (ANOVA) and multiple linear regression. The research data come from the academic record of 123,208 courses of 2622 undergraduates from the classes of 2017–2021 in a Chinese university, across nine semesters. The data do not satisfy the homogeneity of variance hypothesis test; therefore, a non-parametric test is adopted for hypothesis testing. The results show that: (1) In the online education semester, the students’ academic record improved substantially with low fluctuation and greater stability; (2) this improvement is more obvious for sophomores and juniors than for freshmen, and (3) online education during the pandemic period significantly improved the course scores of undergraduates, especially sophomores, in the following one or two semesters.