A critical reconceptualization of faculty readiness for online teaching

Abstract

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.

Faculty readiness for online crisis teaching: transitioning to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…We argue that the pivot to online teaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic challenges the focus of previous research and exceeds standard conceptualisations and measures of faculty readiness to teach online. Compounding this fact is the reality that conventional conceptualisations of online readiness do not attend to the affective dimensions of transitioning to online teaching or the cultural issues of doing so within institutions that tend to reward scholarly publications rather than teaching innovations (Cutri and Mena 2020).…”

“…The preliminary considerations stage consisted of identifying in the literature the constructs of interest. Guided by the themes identified by Cutri and Mena (2020), we revisited the literature that they reviewed and identified 11 constructs of faculty readiness (Please refer to Appendix A). We then developed items to measure various aspects of these constructs identified in the literature.…”

“…The qualitative portion of this mixed-methods study was analysed to show the insights and interpretations from teacher educators as they made sense of the constructs of faculty online readiness from the research literature during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first theme of constructs in the research literature identified by Cutri and Mena (2020) was comfort with risk. Risk was operationalised as tackling an unknown mode of teaching, departing from known teaching practices, and fear of failure.…”

“…The remaining themes in the research literature identified by Cutri and Mena (2020) relate to cultural factors of faculty online readiness. Cultural factors are operationalised as cultural norms of academia such as the types of behaviours and practices normally rewarded in higher education.…”

“…Cultural factors are operationalised as cultural norms of academia such as the types of behaviours and practices normally rewarded in higher education. The third theme in the research literature identified by Cutri and Mena (2020) is teaching norms. Appendix A shows the constructs affiliated with this theme and the corresponding items from the FROCT survey.…”