[Aspects of online teaching and their relation to positive experience and motivation among teacher education students: mixed-method findings at the beginning of COVID-19].

In the summer semester 2019/20 it was degreed that universities switch to purely online learning due to COVID-19/SARS-CoV‑2. This switch offered the unique opportunity to study online learning in teacher education. The aim of the present study was to give recommendations for online learning in teacher education. To this end, we identified aspects of online learning that students experienced beneficial/impeding (study 1) and analyzed their relation to the positive/negative experience of students and their goal orientation (study 2). In study 1 ( n  = 75), we asked students for aspects of online learning that they experienced as beneficially/impeding for their perceived learning gain (open data & materials: https://osf.io/7knhj/). The study was pre-registered before data collection (https://osf.io/438p6/). We identified 39 aspects by means of qualitative content analysis. In study 2 ( n  = 855), these aspects were rated for positive & motivating or negative & demotivating courses and related to the situational goal achievement (SELLMO) of the teacher education students (open data & materials: https://osf.io/87v5y/). The study was pre-registered before data collection (https://osf.io/rj5f9/). Analyses with BEST showed seven aspects with very large differences (| d | > 3), 18 with large differences (3 > | d | > 0.8), seven with medium/small differences (0.8 > | d | > 0.2), and seven without differences (2 > | d |) between positive & motivating or negative & demotivating courses. Multigroup path analyses identified 13 aspects that were related to goal orientation. Our results contribute to the understanding of online learning in teacher education. They highlight that online learning can be optimized and steered depending on the objective-positive experience, goal orientation, or both.