Is Long-Serving Teaching Experience a Barrier of Transformation in Online Teaching? – An Exploration

Online teaching, an inevitable part of education in 2020, has its own advantages and disadvantages with respect to the perspectives of student and teachers. Every teacher has been in a situation to transform suddenly to the fluctuating needs of education in the COVID 19 crisis. Is this transformation quick and easy for all the teachers? This is an important question that may depend on number of factors including teachers’ teaching experience, economic and social background, and skills in teaching tools, motivation and attitude. This research study looks into the parameter “Teaching experience” and attempts to find whether teaching experience stands as an influencing factor in the transformation process. As learning new is always easier than unlearning, this parameter is critically important in analysing whether the long-time experience affects the rate of transformation to online teaching. The research is conducted as a qualitative research with surveys obtained from students and faculty of the host institution after the first cycle of online teaching (after May 2020). 66 teachers and 215 students from various engineering disciplines participated in the survey. Observations from the survey are analysed in different elements of online learning. This study compares the expectations of students and the preference of teachers in these elements. From the study, it has been inferred that teaching experience has a significant impact on the transformation of teachers to meet the students’ expectations in the perspective of online teaching. The study also enables suitable recommendations for need based training programs.