Shifting from face-to-face to online teaching during COVID-19: The role of university faculty achievement goals for attitudes towards this sudden change, and their relevance for burnout/engagement and student evaluations of teaching quality

Abstract

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many faculty members were required to abruptly shift from face-to-face to online teaching. Within this, some instructors managed well, while others struggled. To elucidate interindividual differences in online teaching and learning during this unexpected circumstance, we focus on faculty members' attitudes towards this shift and examine their associations with underlying motivations as well as burnout/engagement and student learning. We analyzed longitudinal data of 80 faculty members' achievement goals during the semester prior to shifting to online teaching, as well as their attitudes and burnout/engagement during the first semester with enforced online teaching. We additionally included 703 student ratings of these faculty members' teaching quality. Results indicated that learning approach goals of faculty were positively associated with perceiving the shift to online teaching as a positive challenge and as useful for their own competence development. Conversely, performance (appearance) avoidance and work avoidance goals went along with perceiving this change as threatening, which was in turn positively related to burnout levels and negatively related to student ratings of teaching quality. Taken together, these findings point to the relevance of faculty goals and attitudes for successful online teaching and learning.

Keywords: Attitudes; Corona; Goal orientations; Motivation; Stress; Teacher.

Fig. 1

Overview of the COVID-19 outbreak, measures and policy changes, and infected cases (cumulative number for 14 days of confirmed COVID-19 cases per 100,000) in Germany that led to the summer semester being taught online instead of face-to-face.

Fig. 2

Statistically significant effects of the hypothesized paths. Parameter estimates for the non-significant paths are not presented for clarity but are reported in Table S1 in the supplemental materials. Presented are standardized parameters with their standard errors in brackets. Correlations between goals, between attitudes, and between the two outcome variables were modeled but are not presented.