Faculty Perspectives and Opinions on Online Education

対面授業

教員視点

授業資源

心理的負担

online education

face-to-face education

faculty perspective

course resources

psychological well-being

This study explores faculty perspectives on online education at Hitotsubashi University, with the purpose of enabling evidence-based practices in the following academic year. We invited 537 faculty members (full-time, part-time) who had taught online courses in 2020 to participate in a survey. The questionnaire asked participants to evaluate the content and features of online courses, university support services, online educational system, as well as psychological well-being. Two hundred forty eight faculty members completed the survey (response rate = 46.2%). Responses on several questions were compared with those of 927 students from the same university. As a result, faculty perspectives were as follows: (1) preparing and delivering an asynchronous course is time-consuming, (2) there is an oversupply of course resources (course assignments, speed of delivering information, etc.), (3) there is a lack of communication between faculty and students, as well as among students themselves, (4) difficulty in operating computers predicts lower psychological well-being, (5) satisfaction with university support services improves psychological well-being, (6) most faculty members desire a combination between online and face-to-face education in the future. In addition, comparing faculty and students responses, results revealed the following points: (A) students felt that there was an oversupply of course resources and lack of communication more than faculty, (B) both faculty and students thought the advantage of online education is the flexible schedule, while its disadvantage is lack of communication, (C) from faculty perspective, another advantage of online education is avoiding infection risk and easy sharing of teaching material, (D) from students’ perspective, the advantage of online education is studying at one’s own pace, (E) another disadvantage mentioned by faculty was related to the time costs of preparing online classes, (F) problems related to course administration and evaluation process were mentioned as disadvantage by students. Overall, this study revealed the pros and cons of online education during the Covid-19 emergency in Japan.