Perception of HEIs Teachers towards Online Teaching

Abstract

COVID-19 has affected Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) not only in Wuhan, China where this novel corona virus originated but all other HEIs across the globe in 2020. In India, closure of schools & colleges since March 2020 has made education of the students a great challenge in front of the HEIs

teacher. Although, teachers are making all the efforts to pass the knowledge to the students from home during lockdown by adapting several online tools.The research was conducted to study the perception of teachers and their experiences of teaching students online during the lockdown. A questionnaire was distributed to 300 teachers of HEIs out of which 260 responses were analysed.

The Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was carried out in SPSS 23. The analysis represents the perception of teachers towards online teaching the basis of four factors “Efficacy”, “Communication Gap”, “Teachers Burden” and “Comfortability”. Research findings indicated that the majority of teachers had intermediate computer competency and half of them had training in online teaching, with only a few having a stability issue with internet connection.

From the analysis it was revealed that teachers believe that online teaching result in more academic dishonesty, impersonal and lack feeling compared to face-to-face teaching, and difficult in student-teacher interaction. Additionally, faculty believed all lectures cannot be replaced by technology tools and it increases teacher’s burden. Teachers also opined that technology of online education courses is difficult to manage. However, study shows that despite challenges the teachers are taking online teaching positively and with time they have adapted to the new normal from face to face teaching to online teaching. Teachers of HEIs are overall in favour of online teaching thus embracing the challenges imposed by COVID-19 pandemic by actively partaking in shaping the future of students during these tough times.