Browsing by Subject "Threshold concepts"

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    Why Is This So Hard? An Interpretive Case Study Approach to Understanding Faculty’s Challenges in Transitioning to Fully Online Teaching During the COVID-19 Pandemic
    (2022-06) Barbaro, Valerie
    “The COVID-19 pandemic has created the largest disruption of education systems in history, affecting nearly 1.6 billion learners in more than 190 countries and all continents”: This sentence opens the August 2020 United Nation’s policy brief on the education during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond (p. 2). We read such a statement and don’t even blink at the missing other side of the equation—the teacher. But this is nothing new. Research on online teaching and learning in higher education has long ignored the teacher’s perspective (Martin et al., 2020), which, during the pandemic, came at a great cost to teachers and students alike. This dissertation study seeks to begin rectifying this oversight. Guided by the threshold concepts for online teaching line of research (Gosselin et al., 2016; Kilgour et al., 2019; Northcote et al., 2011; Northcote et al., 2015), this study applies an interpretive case study approach (Merriam, 1998) to understanding faculty’s challenges as they transition from teaching face-to-face (f2f) to teaching fully online courses during the pandemic. It addresses one main research question, Why is transitioning to online teaching so hard for f2f teachers, despite their technological know-how? with three sub-components: 1) What challenges fit into the threshold concepts framework? 2) What challenges fall outside of this framework? and 3) What is the nature of the challenges that fall outside the threshold concepts framework? The study features three focal participants—all technologically capable, seasoned faculty, each representing a different level of attitude toward/comfort in their new role as an online instructor—with a goal of developing a deeper understanding of the nature of this phenomenon. Digging beyond the surface-level challenges to really come to appreciate faculty’s grapplings, this dissertation study aims to lay the groundwork for then beginning to address these issues to improve the teacher (and student) experience of online courses.