A majority of higher education faculty view managing multiple modalities of a course for online and/or in-person needs as their biggest challenge, according to a new report from educational content company Cengage.
Thais Alencar
The 2022 report, “Faces of Faculty: The Higher Education Instructor Experience,” is composed of findings from asking 1,025 faculty at 581 U.S. higher ed institutions – both two- and four-year – about how their job responsibilities and satisfaction today compare to those of three to five years ago.
Demographic breakdowns of those interviewed in the study showed that 77% of respondents identified as white, 8% as Southeast or East Asian, and 2% as Black, Afro-Caribbean, or African American. The study’s populations aligned closely with current U.S. faculty populations, said Lyra Liang, the report’s lead researcher.
The majority of respondents were female, 54%, and most were full-time professors, 56%.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent shifts from in-person to virtual/hybrid learning has warped instructor responsibilities, the report noted, with 80% of respondents saying their role as an educator has dramatically changed compared to 3-5 years ago.
“We are seeing that the pandemic has forced the faculty to completely change their style of teaching and communication with students,” Liang said. “And these sudden changes have been really stressful for some of them."
Thais Alencar, vice president of product management and learning experiences at Cengage, said that the report confirmed what Cengage had already been seeing: faculty struggling with moving into a more virtual world of learning.
