Students’ perceived stress between online and offline class modes: Impact on students’ academic engagement and well-being

Academic activities have already returned to normal. As the academic community struggled to bring comfort to students after the two-year online learning mode, the crucial question now is—which mode of learning suits best among the students these days? This present study investigates the perceived stress of university students during online and offline learning modes, and how these affect their academic engagement and well-being. It specifically determines whether the online class brought a higher degree of stress than the offline class, or vice versa, and how they accordingly affect students’ personal conditions. Using the rule of the thumb, 644 university students in Thailand were surveyed using a self-administered questionnaire that contains such scales as Perceived Stress Scale, Utretch Work Engagement Scale for Students and Satisfaction with Life Scale through Google forms. With the use of PLS-SEM, the results of the study discovered that students’ perceived stress during the online and offline learning modes both significantly affect their academic engagement and subjective well-being such that the higher stress they perceived both in online and offline learning modes, the lower their academic engagements and well-being are.