Engineering Instructors' Self-Reported Emotions During Emergency Remote Teaching

• Main Authors: Rehmat, Abeera P., Diefes-Dux, Heidi A., Panther, Grace
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: adaptability; Conferences; COVID-19; emergency remote teaching; emotions; engineering; Engineering education; instructors; Pandemics; Springs
• ISSN: 2377-634X
• DOI: 10.1109/FIE49875.2021.9637440

This Research paper explores engineering instructors' ability to emotionally adapt to remote teaching and whether they felt their emotions were typical compared to a non-COVID semester. Participants, including engineering professors of practice, tenure-track and tenured faculty from five engineering disciplines completed weekly online surveys during the last seven weeks of the Spring 2020 semester. Adaptability, as a framework, was used to examine instructors' emotions over the initial weeks of remote instruction. Descriptive statistics were used to explore engineering instructors' emotions across the seven weeks and typicality of these emotions as compared to a non-COVID semester. The findings revealed that over the seven-week period, instructors reported their emotions as being more positive than negative. More than half of the instructors felt their emotions were atypical during the first four weeks and typical during the last three weeks. In addition, many instructors (73%) felt accomplished by the end of the semester. Understanding instructors' feelings during this forced change to emergency remote teaching can serve to identify emotional support needed for faculty to be able to change.