Insung Jung

This paper explores faculty’s perspectives and use of open educational resources (OER) and their repositories across different countries by conducting a multiple case study to find similarities and differences between academics’ awareness, perceptions and use of OER, as well as examining related aspects of institutional policy and quality that may influence individual views. Data were collected through nine expert reports on each country studied (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Spain and Turkey) and were analyzed through qualitative content analysis using thematic coding. Findings show the impact on individual OER adoption with regard to the individual control of diverse factors by faculty members; of institutional policies and quality measures on the externally determined factors (by the institution); and of institutional professional development and provision of incentives in more internally determined factors (by the faculty members themselves). These findings carry implications for higher education institutions around the world in their attempt to boost OER adoption by faculty members.

The purpose of this study was to investigate instructional changes made by faculty for emergency online teaching necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and hence to explore key factors related to those changes from an ecological systems perspective. Data on various individual, course, and institutional factors and instructional change variables were collected from 201 educators at higher education institutions. Results revealed that the level of instructional changes made by faculty was on average between substituting their existing course for an online one with some functional improvement (augmentation-level 3) and critical course redesign (modification-level 4), but that educators did not reach the level of the creation of new tasks which were previously inconceivable (redefinition-level 5). The biggest instructional change was found to be in teaching behaviors, followed by technology use, with only small changes in beliefs about online teaching. Factors that most highly correlated with instructional change were individual educators’ technology acceptance and innovation propensity, media synchronicity of the course, and the fidelity of institutional support. Recommendations are provided to aid strategic coping by universities facing a major crisis, with insights that may ultimately improve the quality of higher education in non-crisis contexts.

This study aimed to chronicle and understand the emergency online teaching experience of five faculty members in a liberal arts college located in Tokyo, Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, adopting the autoethnographic method. It explored the nature and dimensions of problems the faculty members faced, resources used to make sense of problems encountered, and actions they took to solve the problems as reflective practitioners in emergency online teaching. It also examined differences between faculty members over time. Analysis of seven weeks of autobiographic reflective journals during a 10-week academic term revealed that the faculty members encountered a range of problems during the classes, especially student-related and technology-related issues. When encountering problems, faculty members utilized references such as their past experience in face-to-face classroom teaching. Faculty members with more online teaching experience were more adaptable and flexible in mobilizing other references to solve problems. Overall, all members worked as reflective learners and practitioners who continued to reflect on the problems they faced and find solutions. These findings suggest that engaging in reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action can be effective ways for faculty members to develop their competencies to solve problems in emergency online teaching situations when responding to unprecedented challenges and issues is continuously needed.