A multi-institutional assessment of changes in higher education teaching and learning in the face of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

COVID-19 has had a profound influence on the conduct of teaching and learning in higher education. Almost everywhere a sudden shift occurred as educators transitioned courses from mainly face-to-face teaching and learning to emergency remote instruction, mostly conducted online. While details varied for individual faculty members, institutions, and countries, all confronted new challenges. We examine the immediate effects of COVID-19 on teaching and learning in higher education. Our results are based on a sample of 309 courses, and the academic staff who taught them, at eight colleges and universities varying in size and context across four continents. We document first how institutions, and their instructors, varied in their capacity for dealing with the rapidity of the COVID-19 teaching and learning pivot. We further demonstrate that the suddenness of the pandemic’s onset, and the quick response this demanded of instructors, meant that there was little systematic patterning in how academic staff were able to adapt – save for nimbleness. Rapidity of response meant differences were far more idiosyncratic than they were systematic, at least with respect to how individual faculty responded.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching and learning
• COVID-19
• emergency remote instruction
• online learning
• learning technology
• higher education

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for support and assistance from a large number of people, including Vincent Alonso, Udeme Anosike, Audon Archibald, Lisa Chang, Daphne Chalmers, Alex Chow, Hailey Craig, Catherine Delfosse, Pascal Detroz, Kevin Dullaghan, Hannah Exley, Adam Fein, Timothy Jireh Gaspar, Matthieu Hausman, Cassie Hudson, Françoise Jérôme, Regina Kaplan-Rakowski, Laurent Leduc, Jeff Miller, Laura Page, Johanna Marion Torres, and Jennifer Vincent. All authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from their own institutions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Terminology differs across our institutional cases. In order not to privilege any one nomenclature, and for ease of readability, we refer to the teacher of courses of instruction as faculty member, academic staff, instructor, course coordinator, educator, teacher, and so forth. We use courses of instruction to refer to individual classes (e.g. Psychology 911 or Chemistry 126), although we shorten this to “courses” as we proceed (in some of our cases, “course” refers to what others label as “degree programs” or “courses of study.”).

2. In our methods section we explain how the 309 courses in our sample became the 283 that we analysed.

3. Not all institutions pivoted this quickly but it was typically done within a week. Our stress on rapidity also implies little preparation before public health edicts were issued. The situation is more complicated since instructional design professionals were already gearing up for remote instruction prior to the announcement of public health measures. Nevertheless, for most instructors, the shift to remote instruction was sudden and unplanned.

4. Two institutions were only able to use self-administered questionnaires and so our institutional case count varies depending upon where the questions being analysed are drawn from (we note this as we proceed).

5. We also interviewed instructional support professionals and senior administrators in these clustered disciplinary units, although, due to lack of space, we do not report detail from those interviews here.

6. There is no statistically significant difference in the transition profiles of the other seven institutions.

7. One institution did not have a universal LMS (several smaller systems were used) but even here three-quarters of instructors reported using one of the local LMS-variants. This institution still differs from the others on many LMS adoption measures because of this more limited LMS availability.

8. Most often, both before and after the transition, instructors employed only a subset of these pedagogical features (i.e. typically only one or two of our active learning strategies were used in any single course). Certainly in a few courses these pedagogical activities might have been online prior to the COVID-19 transition, but this was more the exception than the rule (we did not ask a direct question about this).

9. One institution is excluded on this specific item and the subsequent question about grading standards because the institution opted to assign pass / fail grades to students (to the dismay of some faculty, and the approval of others). Nevertheless, a majority of instructors carried on with classes, providing feedback to students.

10. People may have interpreted “instructional materials” differently. We were thinking this included strategies for active learning (e.g. peer reviewing online submissions, using breakout discussions online) but some instructors may have thought of materials as only course content which is less likely to be shared across courses. The higher use of the “not applicable” category perhaps signals this ambiguity. With 20/20 hindsight we should have asked about “instructional methods.”

11. We also replicated our results using ordinal regression.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by: Ateneo de Manila University (Philippines) received project funding from the Ateneo University Research Council, an off-cycle COVID-19 Research Grant titled “Lessons for Higher Education from the COVID-19 Transition to Online Teaching and Learning.” Deakin University (Australia) received internal project funding. Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands) received project funding from the 4TU Centre for Engineering Education (4TU.CEE). Humber College (Canada) received internal project funding. The University of Liege (Belgium) received internal project funding. The University of British Columbia (Canada) received funding from an off-cycle Teaching Learning and Enhancement Fund. The University of New South Wales (Australia) received internal project funding. Lastly, the University of North Texas (United States) received internal funding from the UNT NetDragon Digital Research Center in the Division of Digital Strategy and Innovation (DSI).