Lesson from Covid-19 Pandemic and Online Teaching: Challenges and Opportunities for Teachers in Higher Education

Abstract

The COVID-19 has triggered mega changes worldwide. This disruption has forced the entire world to shut down several activities including formal teaching-learning systems. As a result of this, the face to face teaching couldn’t carry on in the educational institutions and resulted in a shift from traditional learning to online learning.  This pandemic response platform brought various challenges for teachers as well as the students. This study investigated the challenges during online teaching in the COVID-19 situation which transformed into opportunities. The current study investigated the challenges and opportunities for teachers during the online teaching learning in the COVID-19 situation. Research method used for this study was qualitative research method. The data was collected from randomly selected fifty-six public sector university teachers. All the participants contributed to this study through in-depth online interviews. Interview themes were developed which explored the perception of interviewee about online teaching learning, challenges in online teaching, opportunities, and compatibility and practices.  The results demonstrated that factors of limited resources, COVID-19 anxiety and stress, lack of training, improper EdTech system in higher education, and weak online assessment system became bigger challenges for teachers. The teachers perceived COVID-19 lockdown situation and online teaching and learning system affecting their quality of instruction and learning. Most of the university teachers were less satisfied with online learning. On the other hand, digital transformation, research innovation, digital competencies, digital instruction delivery, technological innovation, and resource utilization were seen as opportunities by the teachers. Different research designs with comparative modes of online teaching learning may be used in further researches to gain more objectivity.