Home // International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, volume 16, numbers 3 and 4, 2023 // View article

Digital Transformation after Covid-19 and the Balancing Act of Digital Teaching

Authors:
Alexander Tillmann
Sarah Voß-Nakkour
Michael Eichhorn
Frank Kühn

Keywords: culture change; digital transformation; digital learning and teaching; higher education; digital accessibility

Abstract:
With the Covid-19 pandemic, academic teaching changed fundamentally and university teachers across the board came into contact with the opportunities and challenges of digital teaching. The impact of this change, with both positive and negative consequences, requires adjustments at different levels of the university system, ranging from re-design of learning formats, to the expansion of qualification offers for teachers, to new rules for what is credited towards the teaching load. An exploratory study was conducted to examine the impact of the pandemic on university faculty attitudes toward digital teaching and reflect on the advantages and disadvantages that have arisen as a result of digital teaching and what benefits the independence of location and time as well as the possibilities of digitalization have yielded for teachers and students. Additionally, the study aimed to analyze perceptions of and opinions on digital teaching as well as statements about future teaching. For this purpose, 13 semi-structured interviews with higher education teachers and deans of studies at a large German university were conducted and analyzed using inductive categorization. One result is that teachers describe the use of digital tools and methods as more natural and perceive a digital culture change, also thanks to improved infrastructure. Furthermore, four positions could be identified that describe the different perspectives of higher education teachers on the possibilities of digital teaching and the value of on-site teaching. When assuming a certain degree of heterogeneity among students, this results in a tension field of advantages and disadvantages for students, depending on the chosen teaching formats and preferences of the teachers. In this article, reasons behind these four different perspectives are discussed as well as recommendations given for the future design of post-pandemic teaching.

Pages: 127 to 141

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2023. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 30, 2023

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2679