Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate instructional changes made by faculty for emergency online teaching necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and hence to explore key factors related to those changes from an ecological systems perspective. Data on various individual, course, and institutional factors and instructional change variables were collected from 201 educators at higher education institutions. Results revealed that the level of instructional changes made by faculty was on average between substituting their existing course for an online one with some functional improvement (augmentation-level 3) and critical course redesign (modification-level 4), but that educators did not reach the level of the creation of new tasks which were previously inconceivable (redefinition-level 5). The biggest instructional change was found to be in teaching behaviors, followed by technology use, with only small changes in beliefs about online teaching. Factors that most highly correlated with instructional change were individual educators’ technology acceptance and innovation propensity, media synchronicity of the course, and the fidelity of institutional support. Recommendations are provided to aid strategic coping by universities facing a major crisis, with insights that may ultimately improve the quality of higher education in non-crisis contexts.
Highlights
With the rapid growth of online education, many researchers have explored experiences of faculty online teaching, including occurring during crises, such as natural disasters, or socio-political turmoil
Ayebi-Arthur (2017), in a study of nine faculty members in New Zealand who offered online teaching after the earthquakes of 2010–2011, revealed that while most faculty members perceived the usefulness of online learning during the crisis, frequent communication, technology infrastructure and support were the keys to faculty successfully adopting online tools
Instructional changes made by faculty during the COVID‐19 pandemic Firstly, the mean and standard deviations of three instructional change variables; faculty changes in the use of technology, teaching behaviors, and beliefs on online teaching, as well as the total average change of all three (Table 1) were calculated
Summary
With the rapid growth of online education, many researchers have explored experiences of faculty online teaching, including occurring during crises, such as natural disasters, or socio-political turmoil. A recent auto ethnography study conducted in Japan (Jung et al, 2021) revealed that faculty members generally became more optimistic and utilized more diversified resources in emergency online teaching with more online teaching experience All of these studies of faculty experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic are informative, as they reveal faculty members’ ability to quickly adopt online technologies and adaptation to emergency online teaching, as well as their confusion, anxiety, and struggles in the early stages of the transition. What these studies fail to explore, are the factors associated with the rapid adoption of new technologies and adjustments to emergency online teaching by faculty
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