Many students across the globe had to transition between taking lessons in lecture halls to their living rooms in the COVID-19 pandemic.
This drastic change in environment prompted questions about differences in the learning experience. Among them: does the body feel less stress in a virtual classroom as opposed to a physical one?
The answer could be yes, according to a small study measuring heart rate and cortisol levels in students’ saliva, which found that medical students were physiologically more relaxed in an online lecture rather than an in-person one.
The study, published in the journal Anatomical Sciences Education at the end of July, looked at a group of 82 medical students who were attending either face-to-face classes or online lectures in order to measure the ways their bodies expressed stress.
"We know that stress strongly affects learning and memory processes, as well as on sustaining attention," Morris Gellisch, a research associate with Ruhr University Bochum in Germany and one of the study’s authors, said in an August press release.
"To date, the differences between in-person and online teaching have often been assessed using questionnaires in which subjective parameters such as motivation or perceived stress were surveyed. But since learning has a definite physiological component, this raised the question of whether there are any differences in this regard as well."
The study only looked at medical students and was carried out as they attended either a microscopic anatomy course in person or the same practical course virtually, meaning the results may not be applicable to every learning experience or field.
Researchers noted that focusing on medical students was key to their study — while some disciplines require more reading and writing, a lot of medical school relies on the development of practical skills.
In a microscopic anatomy course, students learn about how to study tissue and anatomy at the microscopic level.
Researchers followed the students in a blended learning seminar on microscopic anatomy, in which groups attending the course online alternated with groups attending classes in person.
Every day a class was held, one group would be in the classroom physically, while another group followed along online simultaneously.
Students attending the in-person classes received hands-on experience with a microscope, while students online used a virtual microscopy platform to recreate the experience.
For this study, participants filled out questionnaires directly before the commencement of the course regarding their demographic information and their self-perceived stress levels.
Researchers collected data on the third day of the course. The heart rates of students attending in person and online were recorded throughout the entire 120-minute class, while saliva samples were taken at the beginning, after 60 minutes, and at the very end of the class. Those in the online learning group had previously been given instructions on how to take their own heart rate and saliva samples.
There were 37 students in the online learning group, and 35 in the in-person group.
Researchers also obtained control measurements of the participants’ heart rates and saliva samples on a weekend when participants were not in class. This control data also included 10 additional students on top of those who provided data during the experiment.
Researchers found that the online group had significantly less variability in their heart rate levels throughout the class, meaning that their heart rates were more steady overall and less likely to suddenly race in response to a stressor.
The saliva samples were used to look at cortisol levels — a hormone that is a well-known stress marker, released in the body after a stressful event.
Those in the face-to-face class had much higher cortisol concentrations in their saliva, researchers found, compared to those in the online groups.
Researchers also obtained control measurements of the participants’ heart rates and salivary cortisol levels on a weekend when participants were not in class.
Gellisch noted in the release that physiological stress isn’t always negative — in the context of a learning environment, the body being in a state of temporary excitation can assist with focus.
Stress, in a physiological context, refers to how the body deviates from the physiological ideal to handle a specific stressor.
One other thing researchers found was that when they looked at the questionnaires in comparison with the heart rate and saliva data, there was a correlation observed between an increased enjoyment during class and an increased level of physiological stress, but only for the in-person class, suggesting the in-person learning could come with a higher enjoyment along with a higher tension.
Although online learning has existed since the internet became a part of our regular lives, the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic brought online learning to the forefront in many countries, with many schools in Canada shifting largely to online learning or hybrid learning for much of 2020 into 2021.
Studies have been mixed on the impact of online learning, with some online learning students reporting in a Canadian study from 2021 that they felt like they mattered less in the classroom than in-person students.
This new study measuring physiological stress noted that there was a difference between online learning methods that had been developed over a longer period of time and the emergency remote learning that was instigated at the beginning of the pandemic, pointing out that virtual microscopy has existed as a tool for learning since before the pandemic.
Although researchers found a connection between these physiological stress levels and online vs. in-person learning, the study wasn’t intended to measure the impact this stress had on the students’ actual learning itself.
"Therefore, future research approaches should assess physiological data in different learning environments with a focus on performance differences that should be investigated as individually as possible," the study stated.
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