Learning from the COVID-19 Pandemic: How Faculty Experiences Can Prepare Us for Future System-Wide Disruption

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic provided education researchers with a natural experiment: an opportunity to investigate the impacts of a system-wide, involuntary move to online teaching and to assess the characteristics of individuals who adapted more readily. To capture the impacts in real time, our team recruited college-level geoscience instructors through the National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT) and American Geophysical Union (AGU) communities to participate in our study in the spring of 2020. Each weekday for three successive weeks, participants (n = 262) were asked to rate their experienced disruption in four domains: teaching, research, ability to communicate with their professional community, and work-life balance. The rating system (a scale of 1–5, with 5 as severely disrupted) was designed to assess (a) where support needs were greatest, (b) how those needs evolved over time, and (c) respondents’ capacity to adapt. In addition, participants were asked two open-response questions, designed to provide preliminary insights into how individuals were adapting—what was their most important task that day and what was their greatest insight from the previous day. Participants also provided information on their institution type, position, discipline, gender, race, dependents, and online teaching experience (see supplemental material)