Advantages and Disadvantages, Concerns, and Solutions for Emergency Remote Teaching During COVID-19: Portuguese Lecturers’ Perspectives

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic impacted the world dramatically and how communities and societies behaved. The purpose of this study was to explore lecturers’ perspectives on emergency remote teaching, not only from technology-prone lecturers but encompassing contributions from disparate academic fields, which brought assorted experiences into the data. The qualitative study analyses the perspectives of 344 lecturers from 35 higher education institutions in Portugal instigated by the COVID-19 outbreak. The thematic analysis revealed three themes related to the advantages and disadvantages: the lecturing process, learning process, and life and society. Regarding the concerns, four themes emerged: learning process, self-regulation and compromising the future, resources, the assessment process, and well-being. Finally, solutions encompass three themes: pedagogy and innovation, normative framework, and digital literacy. With a special focus on the solutions, all these themes contribute to designing the structure of a training program for the 21st-century higher education lecturer, emphasizing the digital domain. The themes cluster in digital-based innovative pedagogies (mastering digital education software, active pedagogies for digital environments, lecturer posture in digital environments, “for-digital” studying material production, e-proctoring, and transferable competences besides the digital), and digital competences (transgenerational digital-base communication, webcam behavior, well-being in digital settings, and general digital competences).