The Instructors’ Competencies and Experiences in Online Teaching

OpenAlex İngilizce

This study aims to examine the online teaching processes of instructors in higher education in detail and reveal their online teaching competencies. The study employed a convergent parallel mixed method design, where the comparative method was used in the quantitative part of the research and the qualitative part was designed as a descriptive case study. The data were collected from 490 online instructors in various departments of a state university in Turkey. A questionnaire was used to reveal the instructors' practices, experiences, opinions, and online teaching competencies in the emergency remote teaching process. The results indicated that instructors mostly preferred Zoom for synchronous and Canvas for asynchronous applications in online education. The online teaching competencies of instructors in pedagogy, technology, and facilitation dimensions were found to be quite high, while course administration competencies were intermediate. According to the qualitative dimension of the research, most of the instructors reported a significant increase in workload due to online education. They also cited the advantages of online education as well as the pedagogical and technical difficulties encountered. Keywords: teaching competencies, online instructors, online higher education, covid-19 pandemic, online teaching