Coursalytics.com, an executive education marketplace, surveyed faculty members and students from dozens of leading business schools worldwide to identify how they have been impacted by COVID-19. A total of about 100 faculty members from 40 schools in 11 countries shared how they approach the transition to online instruction in the second half of the 2020 Spring semester.
Business education, including executive education, has become one of the most impacted industries as neither large gatherings nor travel are any longer possible. As expected, a vast majority of schools had to cancel their classes or transfer them to online. The survey demonstrated that 95 percent of graduate and 100 percent of undergraduate programs switched to online instruction, while executive education was almost entirely cancelled or postponed. One third of the faculty members answering the survey questions admitted having no or almost no experience in teaching online courses, while fewer than 30 percent had plenty or at least a considerable amount of experience in the field.
Surveyed academics named a total of 39 tools that they use for various purposes in online instruction. Some of these tools are traditional learning management systems; however, various messaging and video conferencing services are by far more popular. Zoom is the most popular instrument used for all kinds of online activity (even for online written examinations for which Zoom is not actually designed), but mostly used for group discussions with synchronous voice and video and live lectures. The most experienced instructors use Zoom, Moodle and Go-to-Meeting for oral examinations, and the set includes Blackboard for written examinations.
“Switching to online is hard even for experienced educators, but a great number of them had no or almost no experience in teaching online until April 2020,” Coursalytics CEO Ilya Breyman says. “The responses we received show that instructors worldwide have a strong preference for Zoom of all other video conferencing services or any other tech tools. While experienced online instructors choose it for certain design components — using a combination of tools for others — less experienced educators sometimes use it as a substitute for almost any classroom or distance learning activity. Well-known EdTech tools such as Canvas, Moodle and Blackboard are still used, but all else being equal most instructors and students seem to prefer using other software that is not specifically tailored to higher education environment.”
To complement the faculty survey, Coursalytics asked students about their personal experiences with changes in instruction due to the COVID-19 crisis. Students’ responses confirm the findings from the faculty survey. Interestingly, students seem to have even less preference for school-selected tools than faculty members, especially for student-to-student interaction.
Coursalytics.com is an independent global marketplace for executive-level open enrollment courses. The company helps organizations and individuals discover, compare, and book best options for boosting leadership skills by taking part in face-to-face and online executive education programs. Coursalytics’ experts have analyzed tens of thousands of courses and collected thousands of unbiased reviews from prior course participants. Some of the world’s most prominent business schools have used Coursalytics service to map the global executive education landscape to help plan their future offering.
