  The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected the education system
worldwide that was responding with a sudden shift to distance learning. Various
physics courses such as lectures, tutorials, and the laboratories had to be
transferred into online formats rapidly, resulting in a variety of
simultaneous, asynchronous, and mixed activities. To investigate how physics
students perceived the sudden shift to online learning, we developed a
questionnaire and gathered data from N = 578 physics students from five
universities in Germany, Austria, and Croatia. In this article, we report how
the problem-solving sessions (recitations) and laboratories were adapted, how
students' judge different formats of the courses and how useful and effective
they perceive them. The results are correlated to the students' self-efficacy
ratings and other behavioral measures (such as self-regulated learning skills)
and demographics. In a related article, we focus on the online physics lectures
and compare simultaneous vs. asynchronous teaching and learning methods (n.n.).
We find that good communication abilities and self-organization skills are
positively correlated for perceived learning achievement. Furthermore, the
previous duration of studies had a significant impact on the students'
perceived overall learning achievement, on the students' acquisition of
experimental skills during the physics laboratories, and on their assessment of
the recitations' effectiveness. That is, students in their first academic year
show consistently lower scores than more progressed students. For the physics
laboratories, it was found that gathering real data was crucial to the
acquisition of experimental skills and the reinforcement of content. For the
physics recitations, handing in own solutions for feedback was correlated with
perceived effectiveness. We draw conclusions and implications for future online
classes.
