"Profiles of instructor responses to emergency distance learning"

Alumna Teya Rutherford (Ph.D. ‘14), doctoral candidate Sarah Karamarkovich, Associate Professor Di Xu, Project Scientist Tamara Tate (Ph.D. ’18), UCI Professor of Teaching Brian Sato, Assistant Professor Rachel Baker, and Professor Mark Warschauer published an article in Online Learning on emergency distance learning.
 
The title of the article is “Profiles of instructor responses to emergency distance learning in Online Learning.”
 
Xu researches economic returns to higher education, financial aid to higher education, and effects of governmental policies and projects on educational equity and efficiency​. She has conducted several national studies of student performance in online vs. face-to-face instruction, especially in community colleges, and the instructional factors that help students’ success in online classes. In 2018, Xu was awarded a five-year CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation to explore ways to improve online learning at community colleges.

​Abstract

Di Xu

​To understand instruction during the spring 2020 transition to emergency distance learning (EDL), we surveyed a sample of instructors teaching undergraduate EDL courses at a large university in the southwest. We asked them how frequently they used and how confident they were in their ability to implement each of nine promising practices, both for their spring 2020 EDL course and a time when they previously taught the same course face-to-face (F2F). Using latent class analysis, we examined how behavioral frequencies and confidence clustered to form meaningful groups of instructors, how these groups differed across F2F and EDL contexts, and what predicted membership in EDL groupings. Results suggest that in the EDL context, instructors fell into one of three profiles in terms of how often they used promising practices: Highly Supportive, Instructor Centered, and More Detached. When moving from the F2F to EDL context, instructors tended to shift “down” in terms of their profile—for example, among F2F Highly Supportive instructors, 34% shifted to the EDL Instructor Centered profile and 30% shifted to the EDL More Detached Profile. Instructors who reported lower self-efficacy for EDL practices were also more likely to end up in the EDL More Detached profile. These results can assist universities in understanding instructors' needs in EDL, and what resources, professional development, and institutional practices may best support instructor and student experiences.