Cross-cultural Lessons From Remote Instruction: Instructional Perspectives on Pandemic and Post-lockdown College Instruction

Abstract

The advent of the internet began a slow and halting movement toward online teaching and learning. As more universities and schools adopted electronic-learning (e-learning) as a formal mode of instruction, several instructional models emerged in undergraduate and graduate programs. The unexpected spread of the COVID-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented shift to online instruction across universities worldwide. Although online instruction in itself was not new, its extension to students and faculty, who had not voluntarily chosen to participate in it, was new. To what extent do existing models of online course instruction and constrained decision-making account for instructor experiences during emergency remote teaching (ERT)? In order to answer our questions we surveyed university faculty in the United States and China on their experiences of moving instruction online, and about ideas and practices they will carry over from remote instruction as the need for it recedes. When we contrasted approaches for coping and adapting instruction, we identified eight instructional change categories and four instructional response styles. We presented a model for characterizing features of instructional design and instructional response mechanisms - the Interaction Communication Modality model. Our work attempted to overcome a gap in instructional design research for categorizing and identifying multi-modality and cross-modality changes in instruction. Our findings revealed that American instructors reported making more individual adaptations as compared to instructors in China, and also that they were more likely to report that they would carry forward changes after the demands of ERT receded. Changes in each culture emphasized existing features of instruction, with Americans emphasizing dialogic or interactional instructions and the Chinese instructors emphasizing narrative instruction. Lessons we learned from instructors’ experiences of remote instruction help inform educators, particularly teacher educators, educational technologists and designers of learning experiences. We hope that studying the pandemic experience of instructors will help make both instruction and our understanding of it resilient to future shocks that may arise.