Workloads and Emotional Factors Derived from the Transition towards Online and/or Hybrid Teaching among Postgraduate Professors: Review of the Lessons Learned

Abstract

The objective of the present study was to discover which tasks resulted in a higher workload, leading to a higher anxiety of postgraduate professors at different Ibero-American universities, when dealing with the transition from face-to-face teaching to a virtual one. A questionnaire was constructed that was completed by 125 professors once validated. The results showed that with respect to tasks that required a higher workload, the professors had to re-think methodological strategies and activities, correct the student’s work, provide tutoring, and search for materials. As for the degree of anxiety, it was higher, given the increased number of hours in front of the computer, the lack of immediate feedback from the students, the feeling of not reaching all the students, having to look for activities to invigorate the online classes, and the need to prepare more materials and the assessment tasks. The results were the same irrespective of the university, thereby enabling us to conclude that this phenomenon was globalized, and the workload and anxiety were replicated in different contexts. Therefore, it is necessary to implement formative proposals that help manage online or hybrid teaching, beyond the mere transfer of the face-to-face teaching models to virtual ones.

Competency-Based Assessment Practices in Higher Education: Lessons from the Pandemics

“…Our study complements previous reports on diverse aspects concerning the impact of the pandemics on the university teaching and learning processes [6,[48][49][50]. Our research focuses on the assessment practices during the pandemics [14].…”

Good performance in difficult times? Threat and challenge as contributors to achievement emotions and academic performance during the COVID-19 outbreak

“…The structural equation model shows that gender was directly related to proneness to anxiety, unpleasant emotions as well as to academic performance. Comparing to men, women were more prone to anxiety (similar to Macher et al, 2012;Núñez-Peña et al, 2016;Alemany-Arrebola et al, 2020;Bravo et al, 2022;Paechter et al, 2022), they experienced more unpleasant emotions [similar to Pekrun et al (2017), Fierro-Suero et al (2022] while showing better academic performance then men [similar to Zile et al (2021)]. As it will be described in the next section, gender and academic performance are intertwined in a two-fold way.…”

Challenges for Post-Pandemic Virtual Education in Latin America: A Comparative Analysis of the Emergency Remote Higher Education Process in Chile, Mexico, and Ecuador

“…Regarding teaching, previous results report the extraordinary demands that the ERHE put on the instructor's need of re-designing teaching and assessment strategies and coping with the loss of immediate students' feedback in classroom interaction, among other issues [44]. With respect to the variety of components of the pedagogical process, many studies coincide in pointing at assessment quality as the most important challenge during ERHE [45][46][47][48][49], which includes a set of challenges from proctoring measures to prevent students' dishonesty to providing useful feedback and promote meaningful learning from the competence-based perspective of current curricula.…”