Lessons for Staff Development: Lecturers’ Transition from Face-to-Face to Online Teaching for Masters Courses in Higher Education (original) (raw)
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2020
Learning and teaching in higher education institutions around the world have been heavily affected by the outbreak of COVID-19 since the fall of 2019. Teachers were suddenly told to convert their classes online and to be prepared to teach virtually. An online focus group (n = 9) was conducted during the initial period of lockdown in the UK at the end of March 2020 to find out about their teaching experiences of transition into online education. A number of challenges were identified in both synchronous and asynchronous teaching processes, including unfamiliarity with the learning management system, privacy concerns, student engagement, preparation time and technological issues. A set of best practices was developed for instructors teaching online during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Education and Information Technologies, 2021
In recent years, and also due to the COVID-19 pandemic, education institutions worldwide have changed their education paradigm from a traditional to an online system. These institutions have rapidly accomplished their educational programs and activities by supporting various web applications, allowing the completion of the education process remotely. This motivated us to investigate the general perceptions of the faculty members who are teaching different courses for undergraduate students using the distance education system. The proposed technique is based on the use of advanced analysis methods to test the hypothesis of instructors' perceptions of online teaching effectiveness, compared with traditional teaching, will not be affected by the following eight factors, including gender, academic major, age, academic degree, country of teaching, teaching experience in traditional classes, teaching experience in virtual classes (VCs), and whether or not the department/ faculty provided e-learning courses before the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 187 lecturers from 71 departments in 24 educational institutions located in 11 countries participated in this research. Results indicate that the perceptions of instructors regarding the online teaching system generally do not change based on the studied factors. Furthermore, the quantitative analyses illustrate that no significant differences exist in all dimension scales in terms of gender, major specification, age, country of teaching, and virtual experience. Significant differences are found in the dimension scale of distance education effectiveness in terms of academic degree and the educator status in terms of supporting VCs and traditional experience dimension scales. Additionally, the study provides various recommendations, including that the departments should encourage instructors to positively adapt with online teaching by developing the required skills and knowledge. Moreover, departments and institutions should support the teaching staff with specialized education tools. In addition, instructors should strive to decrease the communication and interaction gap between distance education and traditional in-class teaching.
Voices of Teachers and Teacher Educators, 2021
TThis paper attempts to examine and situate the experience of students enrolled in two postgraduate programmes in the discipline of education during the pandemic. The lockdown introduced in response to COVID-19 pandemic entailed a sudden and abrupt shift to the online mode of teaching. In order to understand the efficacy of the online classroom space for students preparing or studying to be teachers and teacher educators, it is important to reflect on the nature of the discipline of education and the current context in which the transition to online learning happened. This transition was not an outcome of a systematically planned academic experiment or endeavour. This paper builds upon narratives emerging from the responses of students pursuing postgraduate degrees in education, and early childhood care and education. The responses to an open-ended questionnaire, semester-end student feedback forms on courses taught in an online mode, periodic informal interactive sessions with students over a period of seven months, and participant observations conducted by the authors in a School of Education Studies in a university in New Delhi were gathered. The informal interactions and group discussions with students were facilitated by the authors' location as faculty in the same department. The intersubjective space thus created between the participants and the researchers, allowed a closer engagement with everyday challenges and students' reflections and experiences. The paper draws from the interpretive paradigm and attempts to examine how students experienced the digital pedagogic space and this transition to online learning.
Education for Information, 2021
The purpose of this paper is to analyse barriers that a selected group of professors at the University of Barcelona faced due to the COVID-19 restrictions, their perceptions of the current situation, and the potential for long-term adoption of new teaching methods that emerged from this situation. It remains unclear whether these professors will return to traditional teaching methods as soon as COVID-19 restrictions are lifted, or whether they will adopt digital teaching elements in the future. The group of professors sought technical help during the first weeks of online teaching. This research uses a qualitative approach through a self-administered qualitative survey. We analyse data using open-ended questions about barriers they faced in creating educational content via video. Answers were coded and analysed using thematic analysis with an inductive approach. We identified two overarching themes: educational material delivery and professors and distance teaching. Findings indicat...
Teaching the Lecturers: Academic Staff Learning About Online Teaching
2012
Developing online teaching skills can occur through involvement in learn-by-doing strategies, which incorporates informal, organic or need-driven strategies. Such processes are sometimes labeled as “bottom-up” staff development processes. In other contexts, teaching staff are formally directed to develop online teaching skills through a series of compulsory staff development workshops or courses. These approaches typically include “top-down” staff development processes. This paper describes how a group of tertiary teaching staff extended their on-campus and distance teaching repertoire of skills to include online teaching skills. In this case, the process of staff development began with collecting data about the concerns and practices of the teaching staff involved. An analysis of the data informed the development of a “middle-out” staff development strategy which comprised a mixture of informal and formal strategies, and acknowledged the ethos of the institution and the specific ne...
With the advent of current Corona pandemic /COVID-19, the universities around the world were closed for face -toface education. In the pandemic crisis, universities had to transform teachinglearning milieus instantly and online teaching went viral at universities. This transition from on campus to online education delivery services affected university teachers in many ways. By applying phenomenography approach, the present paper examines university teachers’ perceptions about the challenges they faced in Pakistani context, university teachers’ re-action towards university decision about the overnight teaching paradigm shift from face-toface to online teaching, institutional support to teachers for online teaching; students’ caliber for online learning, and to assemble university teachers’ opinion about the prerequisites of online teaching. The data was collected through written answers to openended research questions. Interpretative phenomenography analysis (IPA) framework was used ...
Education and Information Technologies
The emergence of the COVID-19 virus has generated the greatest worldwide disruption of education systems (among others) in generations. In Israel, from the beginning of the pandemic, all universities and colleges quickly adopted an online education system, while the other educational systems did similarly, in part or in full. This study examines the impact of the involuntary immersion of students and instructors into digital learning environments due to the COVID-19 pandemic-the impact on the pedagogical practices, pedagogical conceptions, and inclinations toward pedagogical change of university and college instructors during the "Corona Related Teaching Situation" (CRTS). Our research followed a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative with quantitative components. The explanatory design is a two-phase mixed methods-approach design, which began with the collection and analysis of quantitative data and was followed by the subsequent collection and analysis of qualitative data. The current report places special emphasis on the qualitative components of the research. The major contribution of this article is the development of a typology based on a conceptual model that allows for the identification of three teacher profiles that emerged during the CRTS: Experienced teachers, Enthusiastic teachers, and Cautious teachers. The study found that the main variable affecting a teacher's fit into one of these profiles is the level of digital literacy before the crisis. Our typology can be applied to different crisis situations and can be useful for the training and development of university teachers in the field of digital literacy.
When online learning is a must: a case study of emergency remote teaching in higher education
2021
The health crisis caused by COVID-19 has urged face-to-face universities to adapt to the distance-teaching mode. This research seeks to analyse teaching and learning strategies and experiences during the confinement period in the context of the Faculty of Education of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (N=29 teachers, 227 students). The results reveal that design of the course has reproduced face-to-face practices tending towards content-based learning. Lecturers have experienced difficulties deriving from a lack of digital competence and literacy in online pedagogies and students with reference to the paradigm shift that affect their role and tasks. In conclusion, there are pedagogical and technological changes that are here to stay and that the future of higher education will be hybrid. Teachers are predisposed to continue learning about the use of digital technologies and innovative teaching methods while there is a need to incorporate such competences into educators’ educatio...
University Lecturers' Distance Learning Experiences Gained during the COVID-19 Pandemic Period
2020
Semester 2 of the academic year 2019/2020 has brought along a special situation and a variety of new solutions in education throughout the world. The emerging pandemic situation changed the system considerably by impeding both lecturers and students from working and meeting personally. Transition to online, distance education has also presented new challenges to educators, parents, teachers, university lecturers and students, as well as a new path of development. During our research, the experiences and difficulties gained by the members of Apaczai Csere Janos Faculty at Szechenyi István University in the past semester were examined with the help of an online questionnaire. Preliminary results show that the semester of distance learning, despite its difficulties, brought several positive results that enhanced teachers' creativity, pedagogical competencies as well as methodological culture of how the different tools and programs were used.
mLearn 2020: 19th World Conference on Mobile, Blended and Seamless Learning, 2020
This paper will discuss the move from face-to-face to online teaching and learning at the University of Nottingham International College, following the announcement in March 2020 of a country-wide lockdown due to the spread of COVID-19. All teaching of Foundation and Pre-Master's programmes moved to online synchronous and asynchronous classes delivered via Zoom. International students enrolled at the college remained either in the UK, or returned to their home countries to continue and complete their course of study. This paper focuses on the steps taken to prepare and support teaching staff in the transition from classroom and office working to working from home, in order to sustain high standards of teaching, attainment and student progression to courses of study at the University of Nottingham, equal to those already established in face-to-face teaching. Specifically, it examines the measures taken to support and develop tutors' online teaching skills and practice throughout the period of remote working, as well as moving the office working environment to virtual platforms, and the attempt to maintain collaborative and positive team-working practices. Feedback from staff and students suggests these measures were appreciated, a supportive environment had been created and staff were able to guide students to success in progressing to the University of Nottingham to undertake their chosen degree course.