Public administration education is traditionally known for its emphasis on interaction, discussion and experiential learning, which require effective in-person instructions. With COVID-19 pushing many programmes across the globe to be delivered online rather than in person, how this shift has affected the student experience in public administration programmes has been a pertinent and important consideration. This paper addresses the question through two surveys of 147 students in total, at a graduate-level public policy school in Singapore. Two distinctive waves of data collection allow us to capture a nuanced picture of student perceptions both when online teaching was introduced as an emergency response and when it was planned as a deliberate strategy later on. Our findings suggest that students consistently reported a decline in participation and interaction in an online setting, compared with a face-to-face setting. Our study fills a critical gap in the literature related to online public administration education in Asia, while the immediate constraints it highlights and lessons it offers on maintaining a highly interactive and engaging public administration education are likely to apply for educators elsewhere both during and beyond the COVID-19 era.