Lecturer Readiness for Online Classes during the Pandemic: A Survey Research

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most educational institutions across the world have shifted their teaching and learning processes and put efforts into preparing online distance education to ensure education continues uninterrupted. Some did not face difficult tasks or challenges during this process because they were already implementing online or blended learning before the pandemic. However, some institutions, lecturers and students were not ready to adapt to the conditions, and it is therefore important to examine to what extent lecturers are ready to teach online. This research aims to evaluate the readiness of lecturers during a pandemic that arises unexpectedly. It also aims to investigate the weaknesses and obstacles that lecturers must overcome in order to teach an online class. This research applies a mixed-method approach. Lecturers were surveyed through online preparedness questionnaires, and several themes were constructed from the gathered qualitative data. The results show that lecturers have strong baseline technical skills to use e-learning platforms for online courses; they have quickly adapted to using a Learning Management System (LMS), and most have a tactical solution for most online classes with insufficient feasibility, but they do not have a strategic solution. Their sufficiency for teaching online courses was not optimised since they did not fully believe the learning goals could be achieved. This paper elaborates on the theoretical and practical implications.