Purpose - The COVID-19 pandemic led to an abrupt transition to online classes in higher education, with no consideration for the specific students' conditions in Portugal and other countries. Therefore, this study aims to assess the students' perspectives on online learning classes during the lockdown in 2020.

Methodology - The analysis is based on 2,107 valid answers from students of seven Portuguese higher education institutions that took synchronous online classes. Principal component analysis and binary logistic regression were the main quantitative methods used.

Findings - This study identified five factors that, in all cases, significantly explain the students' perspective on the transition to online classes. These factors include not only pedagogical matters (teachers' overall quality) but also elements related to personal or motivational students' characteristics (performance and autonomy; constraints and obstacles to socialization; self-confidence while attending online classes) and technological issues (Internet access conditions). Notwithstanding, self-confidence is not a relevant factor for students with technical limitations concerning infrastructural matters.

Novelty - Besides the contributions of this study, it is important to emphasize its relevance by combining the critical success factors in distance learning with different demographic variables, which are usually less explored by this literature. Notwithstanding, less robust and inconsistent results were found for those variables.

Type of Paper - Empirical

Keywords: COVID-19; emergency remote teaching; higher education; technical infrastructures; students' perspective.

JEL Classification: I18, I23, I28.

URI: http://gatrenterprise.com/GATRJournals/JMMR/vol7.3_4.html

DOI: https://doi.org/10.35609/jmmr.2022.7.3(4)

Pages 116 – 128