This report presents data and commentary about the online teaching experience during the pandemic from 127 faculty at 53 research universities in the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Ireland. Respondents discuss which communications programs and strategies that they use and evaluate their progress as online instructors, and the quality of online education, generally at their universities, and particularly for their own efforts, compared to pre-COVID era education. The study also gives detailed data on the number of online courses taught, in the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semesters. In addition, survey participants give precise estimates of the amount of time it took them to develop their initial online course, and the amount of time it took to teach the same course a second time. The study also gives their appraisal of the likely future of online education at their university, as well as their own personal judgement on how much they would like to use online education post COVID.
Just of few of 84-page report’s many findings are that:
-
51% of survey participants primarily used their course management systems to deliver ancillary course content.
-
Respondents are teaching a mean of 1.66 online classes in Spring 2021 Semester
-
Faculty in the sciences and mathematics/engineering were also much more likely than those in other subject areas to say that educational quality suffered in the COVID era
-
Respondent’s from Australia and New Zealand were the most likely to feel that their COVID period classes were of lower quality than their pre-COVID classes – nearly 65% felt this way.
-
Faculty from universities ranked in the top 25 worldwide spent more time preparing their initial online class than those from lower ranked universities.
Data in the 84-page report is broken out by many variables related to the individual survey participants and their institutions including but not limited to, for individuals, age, general academic field and gender of respondent; for institutions, world university ranking, host country, tuition level, public/private status, and work title. In addition, the data is broken out for institutions that are completely or predominantly online and those for which in-person classes play a greater role.