The increase in enrollment of students in an online course or taking some classes online indicates an utmost need for faculty to devise means of delivering meaningful and engaging online instruction. Instruction needs to be engaging in ways that make sense to the generation of students in our college classrooms. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 presented educational systems with an unprecedented challenge of migrating to entirely online/remote education. Educators across all levels faced the challenge of creating emergency online teaching. This study explored students' perception of active engagement strategies adopted by educators in emergency remote teaching during the pandemic. Findings revealed that while educators devised several ways of engaging students during this critical time, students expressed very few elements of social, behavioral, and emotional engagement across the board in all courses during the COVID-19 pandemic online/remote learning.