College Students' Workload and Productivity for Different Types of Tasks before and during COVID-19 Pandemic in the U.S.

COVID-19 pandemic forces college education to be rapidly switched from face-to-face education into remote education. Two inconsistent findings exist in previous study about remote learning. First, studies before COVID-19 pandemic found remote learning is an effective method, which provided students with higher achievement and improved their work-life balance. However, studies showed remote learning during COVID-19 pandemic is not as effective as expected because of technical issues, lack of motivations and even mental health issues. Second, findings from studies about remote learning impacts on workload and productivity during COVID-19 are also inconsistent. Therefore, this study aims to quantitatively measure college students' workload and productivity during COVID-19 of different types of tasks to provide a comprehensive and latest evaluation on remote learning. The findings of this study show remote learning slightly increases college students' total listening and speaking tasks workload, total reading and writing tasks workload. Furthermore, phone call, in-person meeting, online meeting and email workload increase significantly in remote learning. However, productivity for both listening and speaking, reading and writing tasks decreases after remote learning but no significant changes of productivity are found.