Coping with a pandemic: How faculty members in selected professional disciplines addressed challenges of putting their courses online

ABSTRACT

This dissertation explored how senior faculty members (tenured associate professors and full professors) who work in Education, Engineering, Architecture & Design, Arts, and Pharmacy academic disciplines at the University of Kansas transitioned from in-person to online when the COVID-19 Pandemic started in March of 2020. This dissertation explores the technical/technological, organizational, and course management-related teaching challenges faced by senior faculty members through the early months of the Pandemic. Considering the role of professional academic disciplines that require hands-on activities and the effects of teaching challenges on online courses, this dissertation revealed faculty perceptions of whether they want to continue teaching fully online courses in the future. The data were gathered through semi-structured interviews in the scope of the qualitative research methodology and analyzed employing coding and thematic analysis. The results indicated that faculty members in professional disciplines were not ready for the rapid transition to online teaching in March 2020 due to insufficient time, lack of professional support, and uncertainty caused by the Pandemic. Faculty members experienced significant teaching challenges in their online courses in the Spring of 2020 and the subsequent semesters, even though they tried to cope with these challenges. The primary course-management challenges included the lack of student engagement, challenges in demonstrating and transferring practical skills to students, the lack of teacher presence and control, and the concerns about student-related unethical behaviors in online assessment sessions. The technical challenges included the inadequate features of LMSs that did not support hands-on activities and inadequate technical infrastructure. The time-consuming structure of online courses created an imbalance between faculty members' professional and daily life routines. The results revealed that some faculty members found online courses useful for increased flexibility and a convenient work environment. Therefore, some faculty members felt optimistic about teaching hybrid courses using some parts of online courses in the future. However, most faculty members in this study believed that fully online courses were inappropriate for their academic disciplines as online settings did not allow them to design, create, and perform hands-on activities effectively. Thus, beliefs about the successful pedagogy central to these professional disciplines shaped faculty members' preferences for returning to in-person. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)