Online Yet More Personal: Professors Respond to COVID-19 Crisis

This article represents a Work in Progress. COVID-19 pandemic has affected the way we conduct our lives across different segments of society. Higher education's organizational activities were rearranged as instructors and students were forced to switch from in-person to online and hybrid class activities. We examine how COVID-19 reshaped teaching at an engineering school in a large, public research university in the U.S. Midwest. In our earlier studies (during the pre-COVID-19 era) we found that faculty culture prioritized research over teaching. We also discovered that students avoided interactions with their instructors for several reasons, including the perception that their professors were too busy. Still, a professor's role at a research university involves teaching one to two courses per semester. With the advent of COVID-19, one of the many emerging crises in higher education was that instructors were largely unprepared to teach online and were left scrambling to adjust. Our most current research revealed that instructors had to develop proficiency quickly in various technologies to enable them to pre-record lectures, offer help sessions remotely, and design and administer exams. The learning curve was steep and led to a significant increase in instructor preparation time. This rearrangement of activities seems to have influenced professors' attitudes since they placed higher emphasis on quality of teaching, devoted more time to interacting with students outside class sessions and were more flexible in terms of students’ academic challenges.