RAPID: Faculty Adaptability and Community Engagement when Teaching in a Crisis

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The alarming spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has spurred a national emergency. Many universities announced in mid-March 2020 that all courses taught in classrooms will be delivered online for the remainder of the semester. This requirement means that faculty have no choice but to change their teaching practices immediately. The requirement to rapidly change teaching practices across the country has rarely occurred. In this instance, it may mark a critical time of change in how university courses are taught and how university faculty view teaching. University teaching practices, particularly in technical fields, have been notoriously slow to adapt to changes in technology and a growing understanding of best-practices under a variety of educational circumstances. For instance, lecture is no longer recognized by education researchers as the most helpful for all types of learning. The unfolding response to the COVID-19 mandate to teach remotely (online) provides a unique, one-time opportunity for ground-breaking research to study how crisis-induced changes to instruction influence faculty’s teaching experience. RAPID response funding will enable real-time documentation of the faculty experience during this crisis and help explain the results of studies of teacher-design instruction generated during the COVID-19 event. The results of this study will help future efforts to build faculty’s sense of community around teaching. Building a greater sense of community around teaching will benefit society by improving teaching practices which in turn will improve student persistence, learning, and engagement. Such improvements can ultimately lead to engineering graduates who are better prepared to tackle the diverse challenges that society faces now and into the future. The overall goal of this project is to identify cognitive and emotional themes concerning faculty and staff adaptability and community engagement during a crisis compared to those found under typical teaching circumstances. To accomplish this goal, the objective of this work is to track changes in the teaching experiences of faculty and staff during a crisis by collecting and analyzing data acquired through surveys and interviews. Two research questions will guide the project: 1) During a crisis, how do engineering faculty and staff experience a sudden change in course delivery (with a focus on cognition, emotions, and community engagement)? 2) How do these experiences vary throughout the duration of the crisis? A hybrid convergent and sequential mixed-methods approach will be used to track the teaching experiences of faculty as the crisis progresses. Data collection will be guided by the adaptability framework dimensions of cognition and emotions with additional data being collected around community engagement. Data collection will consist of brief weekly surveys (n=75) and three semi-structured phenomenographic interviews with engineering faculty (n=10) and the staff who support them (n=5) spread over the remainder of the semester. This work will contribute fundamental knowledge on faculty’s adaptability and community engagement in the face of an urgent need to deliver courses differently and could help shape the design of professional development opportunities that promote adoption of research-based pedagogies and instructional technologies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.