Teaching Sentiment in Emergency Online Learning—A Conceptual Model

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education institutions with a face-to-face model have found themselves in the contingency of migrating to online learning. This study explores the perspective of all the lecturers at a Portuguese private higher education institution who were invited to participate, regardless of their research area, in this questionnaire. It aims to propose and test a conceptual model that combines attitudes, preferred activities, and technological experience with the sentiment about the impact of this experience on students’ learning process, on their teaching activity, and on the strategy of higher education institutions. An online questionnaire was conducted to 65 lecturers engaging in emergency online lecturing. The obtained results showed that lecturers reveal a positive attitude towards online lecturing, tend to prefer activities in which they feel most comfortable in face-to-face lecturing, and consider having technological experience useful for online activities. Lecturers have a positive sentiment about the impact of online learning on students’ learning, their faculty career, and the strategy of higher education institutions. The proposed conceptual model test shows that the model has well-fitting conditions. The results confirm the hypotheses formulated: namely, the predictive effect of attitude, preferred activities, and technological experience on sentiment. Faculty engagement in emergency online lecturing shows that the members are available to participate in the changing process, and the proposed conceptual model can be used to assess this readiness.