How instructors initially viewed teaching online in higher education in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic

Learning and teaching in higher education institutions around the world have been heavily affected by the outbreak of COVID-19 since the fall of 2019. Teachers were suddenly told to convert their classes online and to be prepared to teach virtually. An online focus group (n = 9) was conducted during the initial period of lockdown in the UK at the end of March 2020 to find out about their teaching experiences of transition into online education. A number of challenges were identified in both synchronous and asynchronous teaching processes, including unfamiliarity with the learning management system, privacy concerns, student engagement, preparation time and technological issues. A set of best practices was developed for instructors teaching online during the COVID-19 pandemic

A Teaching Process Oriented Model for Quality Assurance in Education - Usability and Acceptability

Part 3: Teachers’ Education and Professional DevelopmentInternational audienceThe lack of standards to objectively assess the quality of teaching opened a new path of research. Teaching involves a lot of different tasks and activities that should be explored, so, consequently, when talking about quality of teaching, it makes sense to look at teaching as a process and to assess its maturity. This contribution briefly looks at existing approaches, and introduces the idea of a teaching maturity model (TeaM) for school and university teachers. Such a framework, even though it proves helpful from a measurement perspective, might not be acceptable by teachers, so this paper presents the results of a study for testing the TeaM model in respect to its usability and acceptability with informatics lecturers at the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt. The results show the interest of our teachers in the model, but also some of the impediments that have to be dealt with when applying the model on a larger scale