Course:VANT149/2022/Capstone/Arts/GroupE3
Investigating Strategies for Canadian University Instructors Dealing with Online Teaching Hardships
A study that plans to improve the quality of education for sustainable development
Research Question
How do University Instructors Deal with Their Hardships of Online Teaching in Canada?
Student Researcher Names
Shufan Liang
Siqi Gao
Skylar Gao
Project Proposal Summary
Our project is about quality education which is one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. During the pandemic, the teaching model had transformed from in-person to online. Since online teaching requires electronic devices with internet access, these technologies may create a lot of difficulties and pressure for Canadian university faculty (Xie et al., 2020). Many teachers have also experienced hardships from both mental and physical health. Online teaching requires long hours in front of computers, which is harmful to the eyes of teachers (Xie et al., 2020). Furthermore, the dramatic change in teachers' working conditions and concerns about teaching online can also have a negative impact on mental health. Most of them have difficulty facing these issues of the pandemic due to a lack of preparation and experience in online teaching (Hidalgo-Andrade et al., 2021). Since there is a lack of research focusing on helping Canadian university instructors to find strategies for dealing with stress, we want to find the most common ways to help university instructors in Canada release their stress, and we plan to collect information through interviews. We choose interviews because we want participants’ opinions, not numerical data. This study will invite 15 UBC instructors with online teaching experiences as our participants through email. Our research will improve the quality of teaching and thus contribute to the development of sustainable education.
Project Objectives and Contribution to Scholarship
Even though there are many academic articles discussing the negative impacts of online teaching on teachers during COVID-19 and some articles offer possible solutions to the stress of teachers, such as “advanced planning, and using work or other activity as a distraction”(MacIntyre et al., 2020, p7), the researchers only proposed the method and did not test the validity, and there is also a scarcity of research on Canada. After our research, the most common strategies for releasing stress can be found so that the results can fill a gap in the lack of efforts to alleviate the pressures of online education for Canadian university instructors. Therefore, in order to guarantee the education quality of online teaching, we proposed the following research question “How do University Instructors Deal with Their Hardships of Online Teaching in Canada?” The discovery of these strategies can prevent instructors' work efficiency from being affected by the stress of online teaching and further ensure the quality of education, which also promotes sustainable development.
Connection of Research Proposal to Sustainability
The instructors’ teaching efficiency will decline when they suffer from online teaching hardships, and it will affect the education quality, and not conducive to the quality education of sustainable goals. Quality Education is the fourth goal of UN 17 sustainable development goals (United Nations, 2015). In addition, our research can help university instructors find the most common strategies to deal with their online teaching hardships. The discovery of these strategies can prevent instructors' work efficiency from being affected by the stress of online teaching and further ensure the quality of education, which also promotes sustainable development. Therefore, our research can help maintain the education quality of online teaching and enhance sustainable development.
References
MacIntyre, P. D., Gregersen, T., & Mercer, S. (2020). Language teachers’ coping strategies during the Covid-19 conversion to online teaching: Correlations with stress, wellbeing and negative emotions. System, 94, 102352. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2020.102352
Hidalgo-Andrade, P., Hermosa-Bosano, C., & Paz, C. (2021). Teachers’ Mental Health and Self- Reported Coping Strategies During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Ecuador: A Mixed Methods Study. Psychology Research and Behavior Management, Volume 14, 933–944. https://doi.org/10.2147/prbm.s314844
United Nations. (2015). THE 17 GOALS | Sustainable Development. https://sdgs.un.org/goals
Xie, X., Siau, K., & Nah, F. F. H. (2020). COVID-19 pandemic – online education in the new normal and the next normal. Journal of Information Technology Case and Application Research, 22(3), 175–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/15228053.2020.1824884