This mixed-methods study was designed to measure and elaborate constructs of faculty online readiness from pre-COVID-19 pandemic literature. Bringing together the validation of a scale to measure these constructs and insights from a focus group, findings suggest that the negative connotations of risk-taking and making mistakes while learning to teach online seem to have been mitigated by a combination of affective factors such as humility, empathy, and even optimism. Teacher educators explained that transitioning online in a context of a crisis contorts normal longitudinal perceptions of preparation and readiness. This new sense of temporality was connected to unexpected benefits of bringing them into partnership with their students. However, quantitative and qualitative results are interpreted to show that assessing students' equitable access to online learning and managing the demands of scholarship and university-based and academic community service duties are areas in need of attention from professional development designers and policy makers.
Online courses are mainstream throughout higher education. This pattern has been accelerated, temporarily or permanently, due to the coronavirus pandemic (Allen & Seaman, 2016;Arum & Stevens, 2020;Garrison, 2011). Tenure-track and contingent faculty's willingness to teach online serves students, but little research critiques the forces that produce and constrain faculty's efforts. Even the most current discussions of faculty readiness lack a strong grounding in criticality. Without such a critical orientation, the power and equity issues involved in the higher education marketplace of online teaching cannot be adequately examined. This critical integrated literature review of 44 studies documents themes of the affective dimensions and identity disruption surrounding faculty's readiness to teach online and explores their professional vulnerability. Structural and cultural forces that produce and constrain faculty's experiences transitioning to online teaching emerged from the analysis. This conceptualization of faculty readiness provides a foundation upon which to theorize faculty's equitable experiences of online teaching.
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