Learning from the COVID-19 Pandemic: How Faculty Experiences Can Prepare Us for Future System-Wide Disruption

Authors

Kathryn M. Bateman, Temple University
Ellen Altermatt, Carleton College
Anne E. Egger, Central Washington UniversityFollow
Ellen Iverson, Carleton College
Cathryn Manduca, Carleton College
Eric M. Riggs, Humboldt State University
Kristen St. John, James Madison University
Thomas F. Shipley, Temple University

Document Type

Article

Department or Administrative Unit

Geological Sciences

Publication Date

2-2022

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic provided education researchers with a natural experiment: an opportunity to investigate the impacts of a system-wide, involuntary move to online teaching and to assess the characteristics of individuals who adapted more readily. To capture the impacts in real time, our team recruited college-level geoscience instructors through the National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT) and American Geophysical Union (AGU) communities to participate in our study in the spring of 2020. Each weekday for three successive weeks, participants (n = 262) were asked to rate their experienced disruption in four domains: teaching, research, ability to communicate with their professional community, and work-life balance. The rating system (a scale of 1–5, with 5 as severely disrupted) was designed to assess (a) where support needs were greatest, (b) how those needs evolved over time, and (c) respondents’ capacity to adapt. In addition, participants were asked two open-response questions, designed to provide preliminary insights into how individuals were adapting—what was their most important task that day and what was their greatest insight from the previous day. Participants also provided information on their institution type, position, discipline, gender, race, dependents, and online teaching experience (see supplemental material).

Comments

This article was originally published in GSA Today. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.

Supplimental material from this paper can be found here.

Recommended Citation

Bateman, K., Altermatt, E., Egger, A., Iverson, E., Manduca, C., Riggs, E., St. John, K., & Shipley, T. (2022). Learning from the COVID-19 Pandemic: How Faculty Experiences Can Prepare Us for Future System-Wide Disruption. GSA Today, 32(2), 36-37. https://doi.org/10.1130/gsatg520gw.1

Journal

GSA Today

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Rights

© 2022, The Geological Society of America.