Opportunistic exploration and adoption of online pedagogy amidst COVID-19 pandemic: studying the perspective of hospitality and tourism academicians

ABSTRACT

Online Pedagogy has emerged as one of the evident scenario amongst academicians since the outbreak of COVID-19 Pandemic. Lockdown restrictions may be seen as an opportunity for all the academicians to explore and adopt online pedagogy. Almost all of us have been using some or the other online teaching platform to connect & share knowledge with our students. According to an article published on w.e.f. website (Li & Lalani, 2020), although there was high growth and adoption of education technology with global edtech investments reaching US$18.66 billion in 2019 and the overall market for online education expected to reach $350 Billion by 2025 but still there has been significant increase in usage of language apps, virtual tutoring, video conferencing tools and online learning softwares since the outbreak of COVID-19. This descriptive review paper attempts to highlight the impact of COVID-19 upon education system & review the issues, challenges and benefits of online teaching through a survey questionnaire posted on LinkedIn & WhatsApp seeking responses only from academicians teaching hospitality & tourism courses, as these courses majorly involve experiential learning. Reliability of the framed questionnaire is checked using Chronbach's alpha. All the prominent issues and challenges are compiled and depicted using descriptive statistics, for simple & easy understanding.