Suddenly online: College instructors’ perspectives on the shift to remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic

• In Event: Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Topic - Education, Schooling

Abstract

There is a wealth of literature on effective college teaching that many instructors use to plan their practice (e.g., Ambrose et al., 2010; Donlan, Loughlin, & Byrne, 2019). However, recent events have forced instructors to make decisions in a novel scenario, which highlights a gap in the current literature. In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the sudden and unprecedented shift to remote college instruction. This included courses that were previously taught fully face-to-face moving to fully online while it was in session. Instructors and students were forced to pivot to pedagogical tools that they may not have used before, and transition their semester plans to meet the moment. Although there is strong literature on effective online teaching (Darby, 2019; Martin et al., 2019), there is not information available on effective online teaching during a pandemic. Therefore, it is important to document instructors’ experiences, so that we can understand more the interplay between online teaching and times of intense stress that may require the modality. The purpose of this qualitative study is to capture the perspectives of instructors at different institutions, document their stories, and learn how to improve teaching during the pandemic in the future.

Instructors perspectives (n=128; 68.75% women; 72.87% White) were gathered across 16 colleges and universities using open-ended survey questions about their experiences. Sample questions include “What were your general experiences with the transition to remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic?” and “What could have been done differently to better support you or students during this time?” Data were collected using Qualtrics in April and May of 2020, while most instructors were still teaching their revised courses.

We plan to use open-coding procedures (e.g., Creswell, 2012) to understand the instructors’ perspectives, and note emergent themes that capture their views. Based on a preliminary examination of the data, we expect that instructors will discuss the ramifications of the choices their institutions made (e.g., the amount of planning time they were afforded), strategies that worked well for them, as well as the challenges they and their students faced during this time. We will also explore the interplay of the instructors’ identities relating to gender, race, and academic rank and how these identities may intersect with their experience of the transition to remote instruction. Our coding process will be iterative. Each author will start by creating general categories of responses to each question, and through discussion distill these categories into themes by returning to the data for subsequent rounds of coding.

An important implication of this work is documenting and sharing the stories of instructors during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this work has more practical implications as well. As we move into the later stages of teaching during the pandemic, these findings will help support instructors and students in their work as teachers and learners. We will provide practices that universities can adopt to help instructors plan for and cope with disruptions in the future.

Authors

• Alice Donlan, University of Maryland - College Park
  Presenting Author

• Tami Kopischke Smith, University of Maryland
  Non-Presenting Author