Exploring predictors of instructional resilience during emergency remote teaching in higher education

Abstract

In 2020, Higher Education institutions were pressed to swiftly implement online-based teaching. Among many challenges associated with this, lecturers in Higher Education needed to promptly and flexibly adapt their teaching to these circumstances. This investigation adopts a resilience framing in order to shed light on which specific challenges were associated with this sudden switch and what helped an international sample of Higher Education lecturers (N = 102) in coping with these challenges. Results suggest that Emergency Remote Teaching was indeed challenging and quality of teaching was impeded but these effects are more nuanced than expected. Lecturers displayed instructional resilience by maintaining teaching quality despite difficulties of Emergency Remote Teaching and our exploration of predictors shows that personality factors as well as prior experience may have supported them in this. Our findings may contribute to the emerging literature surrounding Emergency Remote Teaching and contributes a unique resilience perspective to the experiences of Higher Education lecturers.