What does it take to develop healthy and empowered relationships with technology in the midst of a global crisis?

When the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly shuttered U.S. universities in March 2020, millions of undergraduate students had to trade their college lecture halls for their childhood bedrooms and continue their coursework remotely. Facing extreme uncertainty in most facets of life, few students felt they had much control over their learning conditions. Undergraduates without access to reliable, high-speed internet and a fully functional computer faced even more uncertainty. Our national survey of 3,100 undergraduates revealed that two in five were under-connected when the pandemic began; they started remote learning at a distinct disadvantage to their better-connected peers.

The COVID-19 pandemic undoubtedly created or worsened an array of student hardships. Pandemic conditions also revealed important lessons about how young people can develop relationships with technology that are both agentic and inclusive, even in the most trying of circumstances. Using data collected between April 2020 and May 2022, we present three evidence-based “lessons” from the pandemic remote learning experience that should inform digital wellbeing initiatives going forward.

The first lesson is that positive wellbeing for young people in a connected world requires resolving digital inequality. Under-connected undergraduates faced inequities in remote and hybrid learning at every stage of the pandemic learning experience. These inequities are not static; they create a dynamic experience of “dependable instability” for students (Gonzales 2016)—a population that is often, erroneously, “presumed connected” (Ali 2020).

The second lesson is that developing a sense of ownership over their technology experiences is fundamental to fostering positive wellbeing for young people. We show how students’ earliest efforts to take control of unfamiliar learning conditions unintentionally undermined their abilities to learn remotely. Students were only able to evolve their relationships with technology and feel they could succeed in remote or hybrid learning when control was paired with confidence and accountability.

The third and final lesson is how important relationships are to young people having positive technology experiences that support their wellbeing. Students’ relationships with their professors and teaching assistants were critical to developing the confidence they needed to feel sure that they could succeed in remote learning (Katz, Jordan, and Ognyanova 2021). Students also migrated to networked platforms to develop and deepen connections with their peers around shared interests; those relationships need different conditions to thrive.

For the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, both authors were members of a research team working to understand undergraduates’ learning experiences, and how they changed over time, from multiple perspectives.1 We began with a survey of 3,113 undergraduates in 19 states and the District of Columbia in April and May of 2020 (Katz et al. 2021). These data capture undergraduates’ perspectives during the early weeks of remote learning and provide a unique baseline for understanding how students’ experiences evolved over the months and years that followed. The anonymous, 10-minute survey was mostly quantitative, but also included two open-ended questions that were systematically coded for a deeper understanding of students’ experiences (Katz et al. 2020; Laliberte and Katz 2022):

• Please tell us, in your own words, one positive or negative experience that you personally had with remote learning.

• Is there anything else about the remote learning experience that we did not ask about in this survey but that you feel we should know?

In February and March of 2022, the first author conducted virtual interviews with 12 Rutgers University-New Brunswick students who had been enrolled full-time throughout the pandemic. These hour-long interviews capture students’ perspectives on how their learning conditions had changed over the prior two years, and what they attributed those changes to. These interviews are a key data source in their own right. They also informed development of a second large-scale survey, the third data source on which this chapter relies.

In April 2022, we surveyed representative samples of undergraduates who had been enrolled full-time since the Spring term of 2020 at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and the University of Virginia. The 2022 survey repeated key questions from the 2020 survey to enable comparisons over time, as well as questions that captured evolutions in students’ experiences at two diverse, public universities during the first two years of the pandemic. There were 1,106 Rutgers students and 246 University of Virginia students who participated in the 10-minute survey in 2022, which was largely quantitative but again included two open-ended questions:

• If you could go back in time, what advice would you give yourself about online learning back in March 2020—and why?

• What, if any, are the aspects of online learning that you enjoyed or found valuable that you would like to see continue, even when courses are fully in-person?

Lesson #1: Digital Wellbeing Requires High-Quality and Consistent Digital Connectivity

Access is the most basic aspect of ensuring wellbeing-centered technology experiences. Nonetheless, it is a frequently misunderstood aspect, even by many with authority to make digital access more equitable. In the late 1990s, federal policymakers began using the term “digital divide” to differentiate between Americans who had access to the internet and those who did not (U.S. Department of Commerce 1999). More than 20 years later, the term is still widely used in policy circles.

But the have/have not binary captured by the term “digital divide” no longer describes how Americans experience digital inequality. In April and May of 2020, 93% of undergraduates we surveyed nationally reported having broadband internet at home; 96% had a laptop computer.2 Those data points hide a lot of digital challenges. Three in five of those students reported at least one connectivity challenge that impeded their remote learning: their internet was too slow to reliably livestream class meetings, access pre-recorded lectures, or easily download large files. And similarly, one in three students had to share the device they used for coursework with other people, rely on a device that was in poor working condition, and/or rely primarily on a smartphone to complete schoolwork rather than a computer (Katz et al. 2021). These students are under-connected: their internet access and/or digital devices are too inconsistent or otherwise inadequate to meet their needs (Katz and Rideout 2021).

Under-connectedness describes a dynamic spectrum of human experiences with technology, not a binary and static “divide.” Where an individual finds themselves on the spectrum of under-connectedness, by its very nature, changes day-to-day or week-to-week, because a student who has internet access today may hit the cap on their data plan tomorrow (Katz and Rideout 2021). The unpredictable nature of being under-connected was evident among surveyed undergraduates in 2020. In the year prior to the pandemic, two in five students had had their internet had cut off due to inability to pay for it; hit the cap on their data plan before the end of at least one month; and/or had had an inoperable laptop for 10 or more days (Katz et al. 2021).

Being under-connected has real consequences: surveyed students who had been under-connected in the year prior to remote learning were significantly more likely to report that connectivity and device challenges were impeding their first weeks of remote learning too. Furthermore, under-connected students were significantly less likely to report feeling confident that they could be successful in a remote learning environment (Katz et al. 2021). The inverse relationships between under-connectedness and confidence emphasize how fundamental it is for remote learning initiatives to ensure digital equity as a starting point.

Resolving under-connectedness is essential for historically marginalized young people who are the ones most likely to face these difficulties. Undergraduates who are lower-income and/or first-generation are disproportionately likely to report being under-connected as well (Gonzales, Calarco, and Lynch 2020). Our own data show that being under-connected is related to both personal and familial financial instability (Katz et al. 2021). Gonzales and her colleagues’ pre-pandemic study explains why: lower-income undergraduates rely on older digital devices and are less likely to have cash on hand to fix or replace them if they malfunction mid-term. These students may spend weeks or months channeling time and energy into workarounds for a broken device that could have been devoted to coursework; a more privileged student would simply replace the device and not miss a step (Gonzales et al. 2020).

Our 2022 survey results suggest that universities missed crucial opportunities to support their under-connected undergraduates during remote and hybrid learning. Students who did not have a dependable computer in March 2020 should have been sent home with one, even if it was a desktop from a campus computer lab. Likewise, students receiving need-based financial aid should have automatically received a monthly stipend to ensure that they could afford consistent, high-speed home broadband. To be sure, some universities made efforts to close digital gaps; Rutgers, for example, provided iPads to all incoming students for the 2020-21 school year (Slusser 2020). But a tablet does not have the same affordances as a computer for complex activities that require keeping multiple applications open, as students do when they analyze data or do background research for a term paper. Likewise, while some universities provided hotspots to at least some students, our review of university policies revealed that such initiatives fell short of automatically and transparently providing students with such support.

Because university leaders did not adequately intervene, we saw the patterns of under-connectedness reported in our 2020 survey repeated in 2022. While almost all students surveyed at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and University of Virginia in 2022 had access to home broadband (95% and 98%, respectively) and a laptop (97% and 96%), three in five still reported that their internet connections were too inadequate or inconsistent to support remote learning, and one in three were still using unreliable digital devices.

Lesson #2: Feelings of Control and Confidence are Crucial to Digital Wellbeing

For young people to have empowered relationships with technology, they need to feel that they are in control of those experiences—not being controlled by them. The rapid shift to remote learning in March 2020 fostered an inevitable sense of disempowerment for students, especially amidst the broader fears as communities sheltered in place to reduce the virus’ spread. As one surveyed student noted in April 2020:

After about three weeks of this, I've truly hit a breaking point. I have absolutely no energy or drive left to focus on hours of lectures in my bedroom, plus sit and write papers in that same spot. I speed up my lectures to double speed (which I can do if they are pre-recorded) and/or pay little attention to what is being discussed. It's just all too overwhelming.

This sentiment reflects a broader theme from the 2020 survey: students shared how engaging with technology was exacerbating feelings of isolation, stress, and disconnection from their peers, instructors, and coursework. While this student described their circumstances as “just too overwhelming,” she nonetheless also describes exerting some measure of control over her technology use, by playing lectures at double-speed and limiting how much attention she dedicates to her synchronous class meetings. Other students described similar tactics of disengagement in those early weeks as something of a survival strategy. While such strategies are a way of asserting control, the power they offer young people is inherently limited, since disinvestment brings negative consequences.

We trace the evolution of students’ efforts to develop a sense of control over their unfamiliar, newly technology-centered learning experiences. We show that control without confidence is insufficient for digital wellbeing. Disengagement from coursework may reflect some measure of control, but does not lead to outcomes that are healthy or desirable for young people. We found that, over time, students became more adept at developing strategies that fostered both control and confidence in their abilities to navigate learning in remote and hybrid environments.

2020: Seeking control amidst the uncontrollable

Students’ earliest attempts to regain a sense of ownership over their learning experiences often involved leaning on technology, but few did so in ways that made them feel better about themselves or their learning conditions. If anything, they made themselves feel worse.

In the first weeks of the pandemic, multitasking was a major culprit. Surveyed students admitted, “If the professor is ok with my camera being off, I try and do things while in class to multitask.” Another noted:

I’m doing all my work as fast as possible so I can just veg out again, listening to recorded lectures on double speed or doing work for two classes at once. I know it’s not good, but I can’t get motivated to care about a paper when the world is ending.

Even when remote courses had synchronous meeting times, students described feeling much more distracted than when their classes were in-person:

It is hard to motivate myself to work on my schoolwork or even pay attention during class. All my classes still meet [synchronously] at the normal time, which I believe is good because it adds structure. [But]... I am finding it very easy to become distracted. I can easily look at my phone or open another tab on my computer without [my professor knowing]. I am also struggling to maintain interest in my classes.

This student’s answer reflects broader themes from the survey data: students found it harder to avoid distractions from social media and internet browsing while learning remotely. This was true even among students whose synchronous remote classes approximated a more “normal” course schedule. Those with asynchronous schedules reported even more difficulty in maintaining any sense of learning structure.

What comes through most strongly in students’ open-ended responses in 2020 is how they blamed themselves: “I can’t stay motivated,” “I can’t concentrate,” “I can’t retain information and focus anymore.” Few attributed the limits of their motivation and focus to the unprecedented structural factors pressing down on their abilities to pay attention and learn. The self-blame infusing their answers also undermined their confidence that they could successfully navigate remote learning.

Students struggled with learning new material effectively via unfamiliar learning technologies and platforms. Elsewhere, we have described new content twinned with new learning structures as “novelty overload” (Laliberte and Katz 2021). Students’ novelty overload was heightened by pressures to adapt on a rapid timeline, with their spring course grades hanging in the balance.

There were also ways that faculty’s use of learning management systems (LMSs) in those early weeks had the unintended consequence of adding to their novelty overload. Canvas and other LMSs offer many ways for faculty to customize their course structure, including options to place course content in a variety of locations within the course shell. As such, every instructor did things a bit differently. In his 2022 interview, Vincent recalled:

Every professor had a different way of formatting their class on Canvas so I often missed where the assignments were.… Every category [in Canvas] can be used for anything. There's a Syllabus [tab], but sometimes the professor puts the syllabus under Modules and other times, they put it under Files.

Rutgers students faced an additional dimension of novelty overload because the university still allowed instructors to choose among multiple LMSs in 2020. Quinn was among the students who had to manage remote coursework across multiple LMSs: “Some classes would be on Sakai and some would be on Canvas…. It was so disconnected and a lot harder to maintain and…learn how to navigate. It was a LOT.”

Vincent and Quinn recounted their struggles to make these unfamiliar learning technologies transparent so that they could learn through the system, rather than having to focus so much attention on learning the system itself.3

2022: How structure fosters control and confidence

By the time we conducted in-depth interviews and our second survey in Spring of 2022, students were in a very different place with their coursework and in relation to pandemic conditions. Vaccines had proliferated, coursework was in-person or hybrid rather than fully remote, and while nothing was ‘normal,’ life felt more stable than in 2020. Our 2022 wave of data collection gave students an opportunity to reflect on two extraordinary years of college, since all interviewed and surveyed students had been enrolled full-time at Rutgers or University of Virginia since the onset of the pandemic.4

Students’ reflections emphasize how crucial structure was to developing their sense of agency in learning via technology. One of the things students reported missing most about campus life was a consistent learning routine (Katz and Jordan 2021). We have written elsewhere about faculty strategies that helped students to develop routines by, for example, setting a schedule of learning activities to be completed on particular days each week when teaching asynchronous coursework (Katz et al. 2020).

In 2022, students emphasized that synchronous Zoom meetings were the most effective way that instructors had provided them with learning structure. They reasoned that the immediacy of these real-time interactions made them feel accountable to their instructors and peers, and therefore, to themselves as well. During remote learning, the question of whether requiring students to have cameras on during Zoom meetings was potentially discriminatory to lower-income and under-connected students was hotly debated (e.g., Casey 2020; Castelli and Sarvary 2021). And yet, synchronous, camera-on meetings were what students felt was essential to their developing confidence and a sense of control that they could succeed in remote learning. Quinn’s comments reflected this broader theme in the interview data:

If a professor is asking me to be on Zoom and not requiring that I have my camera on, I don't know how I’m supposed to stay focused…. if they're not forcing me to really pay attention on Zoom, it's hard not to get distracted. I would say when they have the expectation that you're going to be on camera, it also couples with an expectation of engagement and participation. That, just in general, holds me accountable.

Synchronous Zoom meetings, coupled with the visual and audio cues of having cameras on, was the closest possible approximation of in-person meetings during remote learning. These technological conditions therefore prompted the student response closest to that of in-person class meetings.

Quinn’s indication that having the camera on had to be required—not just requested—by faculty, shows that instructors set the norms for course comportment in remote learning just as they do in person. Requiring students to have their videos on clearly signaled to students that their faculty were holding them accountable remotely. This was especially important before students had developed the capacity to hold themselves accountable. The fact that under-connected students struggled to meet faculty requirements of synchronous, camera-on meetings reinforces how digital inequality serves to exclude students from rewarding digital learning experiences.

Novelty overload decreased with time. Students interviewed in 2022 shared how they had started using technology in ways that gave them more personalized control over their schedules and learning conditions. Quinn used the Canvas Dashboard Calendar to anticipate assignment deadlines and delegate certain hours to specific tasks. Sam decided that she needed more control over her productivity system than Canvas could provide, so she developed a structure better suited to her learning style and needs:

[I used Excel to create my] own organizational system. I could color code it, organize it according to month, and type of assignment…I did all that digging [for deadlines in the syllabi] right at the start of the semester, so I wouldn't experience deadlines passing you by.

Other students developed strategies that combined digital and analog forms of organization. Kayla described how she used Google Calendar to organize events she needed to attend and her notebook for tasks she needed to complete: “I don't need to put everything [in Google Calendar] because my analog system works. But because of my new academic circumstances, I'll incorporate some digital technology, for convenience.”

Kayla’s example is emblematic of how students, over time, developed strategies that harnessed digital tools for specific purposes with intentionality, control, and confidence to support more positive technology experiences for themselves.

In the 2022 survey, we asked students what advice they’d give themselves about learning online if they could go back in time to March 2020. Overwhelmingly, they directed their past selves to develop new learning structures as early as possible: “Keep track of deadlines. Set more alarms or use a planner or something. With so much asynchronous content, it became a lot easier to get lost and disorganized with weekly deadlines and semester projects.”

In contrast to the self-blame that permeated students’ open-ended answers in 2020, with two years of hindsight, their advice was to be kinder to themselves: “I would have told myself to go easy, to be patient with myself. That some factors were out of my control and my learning struggle wasn't a result of incompetence.”

Many students noted that losing the relationships that structured their learning rituals and routines explained why they had felt so lost in the spring of 2020:

[I’d tell myself] to stay on top of assignments and due dates….. It was extremely difficult to do that without classes in person and I wish I had figured out a way to do that better. I also formed no friendships or connections with professors and that might have been the hardest thing to manage….My GPA [grade point average] dropped astronomically that semester and I feel as though I could have learned so much more if classes were in person.

In the preceding section, we traced how students developing confidence and a sense of control in remote learning relied on feeling accountable to their instructors and peers. The centrality of accountability shows how using technology for human connection can also require the reverse; human connections were essential to whether students ultimately had empowered and healthy experiences during remote learning.

Lesson #3: Relationships are Core to Positive Technology Experiences

Relationships are essential to developing healthy relationships with technology, largely because of how often we maintain and build social connections through technology. This final lesson focuses on how technology was integrated into students’ efforts to make and maintain relationships with instructors and peers as they navigated learning amidst the pandemic.

Surveyed students who were able to easily communicate with their faculty and teaching assistants in April and May of 2020 were significantly more likely to report a sense of remote learning proficiency than their peers. These students felt, even in those early weeks, that they could: understand what instructors were expecting of them; keep track of deadlines and due dates; and effectively use the digital platforms and programs required for remote coursework (Katz et al. 2021). These students were able to develop the control and confidence highlighted in Lesson #2 faster than their peers, with all the advantages that that implies.

But that’s not all. When we modeled how socio-demographic characteristics, past and current experiences of being under-connected, and challenges communicating with instructors affected students’ remote learning proficiency, we found that students’ relationships with their instructors explained a considerably more variance than the other variables in the model. We concluded:

While digital connectivity provides the foundational infrastructure for students’ access to a novel learning environment, their connections to their instructors provides the supportive framework to develop the digital skills to successfully navigate it, as well as the motivation to persist until that proficiency is realized (Katz et al. 2021, p. 14).

Student relationships with faculty remained highly influential in the model when using our 2022 survey data as well. Consistent with our conclusions, Loepp (2020) conducted a smaller, longitudinal study and found that faculty relationships empowered students’ wellbeing during remote learning in three ways: via (a) regular communication about the course and informal check-ins on student welfare; (b) demonstrating compassion to student challenges, including being under-connected; and (c) using LMSs in clear and consistent ways to support students’ mastery.

Faculty also attempted to support students’ development of relationships with each other, especially early in the pandemic. While these efforts were well-intended, students reported quickly gravitating away from these forums; minimal meaningful interaction was happening in Canvas or Sakai chat rooms, under the watchful eyes of their instructors. In Spring of 2020, students did sometimes rely on faculty-initiated platforms of a different sort. Interviewed students recalled how Zoom breakout rooms, under specific conditions, had helped them to reduce novelty overload and support each other. For breakout rooms to realize this potential, the group work that faculty assigned had to foster consistency and structure interactivity in intentional ways. Terrance described how these interactions helped him build strong relationships with his classmates:

[The professor] paired us together in breakout rooms, and it would be consistent—[we would have the same partners] every single time. I feel like connections…[were at] the professor's discretion… connections weren't really made unless the professor put you in the [same] groups.

There was no way, however, for Zoom to foster the serendipitous opportunities for casual interaction that students missed most, as Mae described in her interview:

There's no running into someone in the hall…[and] there are less conversations before and after [Zoom] classes unless you're on specific forums. Everything is a lot more deliberate, so it feels like everybody has a lot less to say.

Terrence’s and Mae’s experiences reflect the possibilities of well-structured interactions for building student bonds, and how these platforms are limited by having to be “deliberate,” as Mae noted, which felt unnatural and made students withdraw.

By Fall 2020, students’ needs for building peer relationships were different. When campuses pivoted to remote learning midway through the Spring 2020 term, students had had time to build in-person connections with instructors and classmates. When it became clear that the 2020/21 academic year would be fully or largely remote, students had to rely on technology to develop new relationships. They gravitated to more casual communication platforms beyond the watchful gaze of their instructors, primarily relying on GroupMe for course-specific conversations.

GroupMe began as a messaging app for student clubs to connect outside of scheduled meeting times. During remote instruction, students adopted GroupMe as their preferred chat option, to enable information-sharing and peer-to-peer support in course-specific groups. The adoption of GroupMe became widespread, such that interviewed students reported that some faculty’s instructions for group projects included a suggestion that students use GroupMe to support their collaborative efforts, and that some TAs took advantage of the app’s relatively easy set-up to make chats for their sections.

Prior research shows that young people often use different digital platforms for different audiences and purposes—for example, using Facebook for communicating with older family members, LinkedIn for professional development, and Instagram for peers (e.g., boyd 2014; Lane 2018)— just as they did by adopting GroupMe for interacting with classmates instead of Canvas chatrooms. The pandemic obliged students to depend on social networks and digital communication platforms much more intensively than in the past, because digital meeting spaces weren’t just augmenting in-person interaction; they were the primary way that students could reinforce existing peer bonds, meet new like-minded people, and form study groups.

Interviews revealed subtle changes in the social norms governing students’ use of social networks to develop new peer relationships as well. Prior to the pandemic, Rutgers students mainly used Instagram and Twitter as ways to stay connected to peers they already knew. Without in-person interactions as a starting point, students used social networking sites to verify each other’s identities and experiment with building friendships. Students used Instagram to connect with peers they had met in synchronous remote classes and wished to connect with socially. Becky described how a combination of GroupMe chats and social media interactions facilitated new classroom connections and even encouraged in-person meetings when learning shifted from remote to hybrid mode:

I think that as time went on… everyone would communicate through GroupMes… It seems like that nervousness as a barrier was just removed as the pandemic went on and people felt more comfortable reaching out to one another…. Last semester, I had three students from my classes reach out via Instagram before classes had even started. Although some of them just asked simple questions about the textbook, others offered to study together and even just hang out in real life.

Pandemic realities changed students’ norms around social media interactions. They also prompted migration to new platforms entirely. When it became clear that a full return to campus was far into the future, students needed to revive extracurricular social clubs and build new interest groups online. GroupMe’s simple platform of group messaging couldn’t replicate the side conversations that occur in in-person club meetings, nor could it provide support for the growing expectations of audio, video, and synchronous virtual activities that students desired.

Discord became the popular platform for reconstituting student-led organizations online. Discord enabled clubs to customize channels to specific topics of interest within an organization; for example, a writing club created different chat rooms to discuss poetry or prose, and to include video and backgrounds. Students invited each other to these spaces and used them to meet new people with common interests. At Rutgers, Discord worked with administrators to develop searchable hubs where student organizations could list their Discord servers and students could search for ones they wished to join. These migrations from in-person to online, and from platform to platform, underscore how flexible and self-directed forms of digital social organization can help young people build empowered relationships with and through technology, even in very challenging circumstances.

Over time, even Zoom got a makeover for extracurricular social purposes. Mae shared how Zoom became the platform of choice for building community across universities:

A Zoom forum that a friend of mine created…led to really fruitful discussions and the creation of a social justice organization. Beautiful things came out of Zoom because it brought people together that would never have been in the same space physically…. We ended up having meetings with people from all over the Northeast, all over the U.S., for years…. If you're trying to build community you probably need person-to-person relationships, but it can still happen over Zoom if you're really, really interacting with each other.

Mae’s experience reflects how the same platform, when used by students for self-defined purposes (rather than under faculty direction for coursework), have potential to engender vastly different forms of engagement and social meaning.

How Can These Lessons Help Support More Wellbeing-Centered Technology Experiences?

We began this chapter with a question: What does it take to develop healthy and empowered relationships with technology in the midst of a global crisis? While we do not claim to have the answer, our research identifies some key factors that enabled undergraduates to have experiences with technology that offered the rewards they sought: the confidence they needed to regain control over their academic experiences, feeling accountable to themselves and others, and being able to maintain and develop meaningful relationships. We have also shown how achieving these objectives was more challenging for under-connected students than their better-connected peers.

The pandemic was a major accelerant for the integration of technology into every aspect of life. We have described some of the creative ways that undergraduates developed over time to strategically deploy digital tools, from identifying which platforms were best for revitalizing student organizations, to developing personalized ways of organizing their lives and schoolwork. Creative strategies notwithstanding, the pandemic offered young people a two-year look into a world where life was integrated into technology, rather than the reverse. They acutely felt its limitations. As one surveyed student noted in 2022, “I felt so dramatically disconnected [from] everyone within the Rutgers community. I became isolated, and I definitely felt the effects of that disconnection when we returned to campus.”

These kinds of pandemic effects will linger in many societal sectors. But this is the moment to ensure that the pandemic does not undo a generation of progress in diversifying who attends university, and to support students in developing healthy relationships with technology during their college careers. Based on our findings, we see some practical steps that university leaders, technology designers, faculty, and students themselves can take now toward these goals.

How university leaders can support digital wellbeing on campus

Resolve the challenges of being under-connected

Students struggled mightily when they lost access to campus WiFi and computer labs in the shift to report learning. Our data show that universities missed a major opportunity during the pandemic: the proportion of surveyed students who were under-connected in 2022 was no smaller than in 2020. It is time for university leaders to integrate digital equity goals into their campus diversity and inclusion initiatives. Handing out devices is not enough; students need easy-to-access campus resources where they can quickly resolve breakages and malfunctions and instead be freed to focus on their coursework, as more privileged students are able to do.

Comprehensive emergency plans require digital components

We hope that this is our last pandemic, but it will not be our last disaster. Mid-semester disruptions due to extreme climate events or other emergencies will almost certainly require quick pivots to remote learning in the future. Every university should have a clear plan for how digital devices and WiFi hotspots will be rapidly disseminated to students who need them, thus ensuring that all students can continue learning without inequitable disruption.

Commit to ethical learning platforms

University leaders can clearly signal to the educational technology sector that there is a market waiting for ethical learning platforms that protect student privacy, enable faculty to retain content ownership rights, and center students’ needs in the design process. Foregrounding these priorities are an important aspect of supporting positive experiences on all sides of the learning experience.

What educational technology designers can do

Build the platforms students need and deserve

If university leaders create the market, designers should fulfill the promise of designing for wellbeing in a connected world. Meaningfully engaging students in design processes can produce platforms that reduce novelty overload, enhance students’ engagement in synchronous and asynchronous course content, and support them in developing routines and time management structures that engender their agentic relationships with learning technologies.

Build springboards into real-world experiences

Our data show that young people are yearning to build new relationships, but many feel uncertainty and anxiety after a sustained period of isolation. Young people need platforms that help launch them back into in-person activities and relationship building. Doing so will require designers to move beyond social media models that vie to hold users’ attention for as long as possible. Digital platforms must be designed to support and deepen the relationships that nourish young people’s wellbeing.

What faculty can do

Model comportment—for courses, and for times of crisis

Even when technology moved to the center of undergraduate learning, faculty played an indispensable role by setting norms and expectations for students. Having to be accountable to faculty who were invested in their success enabled students to develop a much-needed sense of accountability. Faculty also provide important, non-familial models of adulthood for students, including how to manage challenging circumstances with determination and grace. Digital learning initiatives on college campuses must emphasize how influential faculty remain to student development, even as technology are further integrated into campus life.

Take a well-earned seat at the table

Many faculty view the integration of technology into students’ lives and learning as threatening to established pedagogical standards. The goals of centering human wellbeing in technology development must extend to instructors as well. University faculty should therefore be active participants in developing learning technologies that better support them in facilitating students’ content mastery and capabilities for sustained focus, perseverance, and curiosity.

What students can do

Develop intentional technology practices

Digital technologies can deepen focus, or distract; enable exciting new connections, or foster isolation. The pandemic college experience provided young people with insight into a future where technology is the hub around which life is organized. Few welcomed the prospect. Armed with that perspective, young people should be intentional about how and when they engage technology—and as importantly, when they don’t and won’t. Students felt most empowered when they engaged technology selectively and thoughtfully, with clear purposes in mind. For technology experiences to be positive ones, young people will need to recognize digital technologies as tools they can deploy to foster engagement and build community, and develop the clarity and control to realize when these tools are best used in conjunction with other ways of connecting, or not used at all.

Advocate for the digital resources and future you need

We have provided key ways that university leaders, tech designers, and faculty can help to foster more equitable and empowering conditions for students. But those conditions are unlikely to manifest unless students collectively advocate for the conditions they need and deserve. This will require, for example, helping administrators and faculty understand how under-connected students are denied equitable access to learning opportunities and campus life, and being active participants in developing sustainable solutions to those challenges. Students can collectively advocate for, and even build, digital platforms that prioritize their wellbeing rather than profits. Just as prior generations of students organized to demand what they needed to build the future they envisioned, ensuring youth wellbeing in a tech-filled world will require this generation’s leadership and vision.

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