Abstract:

As we are all aware, during 2020, all over the world, most educational institutions were forced to confine due to COVID19. Within this pandemic context, academic activities were mostly provided by distance learning solutions. Such a transition to an emergency model, from face-to-face education to distance learning raised new challenges for students, lecturers and academic staff. The present study is particularly focused on lecturers’ perceptions, namely, it aims at analysing the levels of their satisfaction with teaching and assessment during the remote period, as well as analysing possible differences in the levels of satisfaction of instructors according to their career position, their tenure and the knowledge domain they teach.

As for methodology, the research was based on a quantitative and qualitative approach. For the data collection, we triangulated information gathered from a questionnaire and from semi-structure interviews. The data were collected through an online questionnaire delivered during the period of June and July 2020, and a semi-structured interview conducted during September 2020. We obtained 547 answers to the questionnaire and 24 to the interviews.

Results show that instructors with the highest career positions demonstrate the lowest levels of satisfaction with the way the lessons and the assessment were conducted during the remote teaching period. Although such a difference is not statistically significant, during the interviews, lecturers with lowest career positions also revealed more satisfaction with the teaching during pandemic and lecturers from highest professional categories mentioned lower satisfaction levels. Regarding satisfaction according to labour contract, part-time lecturers reported higher satisfaction levels with assessment and teaching experience than full-time lecturers. The results also revealed a statistically significant difference between part-time and full-time positions. Emergency remote teaching had a greater impact on full-time teachers. In the same fashion, qualitative interviews reinforce these data showing that full-time lecturers had more teaching and administrative workload and huge challenges when compared with the part-time lecturers. As for satisfaction, according to the knowledge domain, it was observed that lecturers in the domains of Technology and Management, Health, Accounting and Business, and Hospitality and Tourism were the most satisfied with emergency remote teaching.

The qualitative data demonstrate that major difficulties concerned a timely adaptation to acquire the technological skills required in remote teaching and an increase of the workload concerning class preparation. Nonetheless, the biggest challenges encountered were the lack of student’s interaction during the classes and the difficulty to redesign a fair and correct assessment for every subject, within a remote environment.

To sum up, within the context of the first lockdown, we can conclude that the more experienced lecturers were the least satisfied with the teaching and the assessment. Furthermore, in more theoretical knowledge domains, the satisfaction level with the teaching and assessment experience was also more significant. These results reinforce the need to stabilise the teaching staff in the High Education Institutions and to develop new strategies and models for high education.

Keywords:

Remote assessment, emergency remote learning, teacher profile, teacher‘s satisfaction.