Abstract:

The COVID-19 crisis has forced higher education institutions around the world to switch from face-to-face to online teaching, with entire synchronous or asynchronous courses delivered by lecturers via computers to thousands of students, particularly in engineering and science.

This crisis has created a need for online studies that meet the academic standards required by colleges and universities. As a result, it is essential to understand lecturers' perceptions of online studies in engineering and science.

This study examines the attitudes of engineering and science lecturers in higher education. We selected relevant questions based on a literature survey. The research question is whether lecturers prefer online studies over face-to-face studies, and what are the most pertinent factors that influence this preference?

The methodology includes a questionnaire distributed to lecturers via LinkedIn in 2023. We collected 55 full respondents. On a Likert scale from 1 to 5, online teaching scores 3.1, compared to 4.0 for frontal teaching (t=5.64, p<0.01). The interest and enthusiasm of lecturers in online teaching is 3.3 compared to 4.3 in frontal teaching (t=4.233, p<0.01). According to the lecturers, students’ involvement in online teaching is 2.5, compared to 4.0 in frontal teaching (t=9.26, p<0.01).

The initial findings suggest that lecturers in engineering and science prefer face-to-face teaching to online instruction. Most of them estimated that they had relevant aids available for online teaching. However, most of them noted the low student involvement in online education, which creates dissatisfaction among lecturers. Using stepwise regression, we found that their interest in face-to-face teaching is the primary factor influencing their preference for face-to-face over online teaching.

Keywords:

Frontal Teaching, Online Learning, Engineering, Sciences.