In this Lessons Learned paper, we explore the themes uncovered from a series of facilitated faculty discussions on moving their course back to face to face teaching after the switch to online. The Institute at Anonymous University administrates over 100 faculty whose primary department appointments and teaching assignments are in either engineering or education. Over the last two years, the Institute hosted numerous conversations for faculty members to share experiences, research, and assessments of teaching successes and concerns as they changed instructional modalities, both with the initial move online and the subsequent move back face to face. From these conversations, faculty agree that some things during the move to online instruction, such as office hours, video archives of lectures, and some activities in break-out rooms appear to enhance student learning. Yet data showed that students believed the online experience was less desirable than face to face courses. Now that we have had a near complete semester where most classes were required to be held in the face to face mode, we are hosting conversations with faculty to understand the changes they are now making to their teaching because of the experiences from online instruction.
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This content will become publicly available on February 1, 2025
"I'm Not Teaching Them Per Se": Designing and Delivering Asynchronous Undergraduate Online STEM Courses
Although online courses have been a part of academia for nearly 30 years, they are still perceived as "different" than face-to-face instruction. Through in-depth interviews with four instructors, we explored how STEM faculty approach teaching asynchronous online undergraduate STEM courses. The faculty interviewed for this study viewed online courses as "not regular class[es]" and teaching those classes as "not teaching per se." Each of the instructors had assumptions about what a classroom was and about good instruction, but even for instructors who taught online for multiple years, those assumptions remained grounded in the face-to-face environment. There is a need for greater discussion about what it means to teach in an online environment.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1712065
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10486459
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Innovative Higher Education
- Volume:
- 49
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0742-5627
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 91 to 111
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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