Survey Shows Russian University Teachers Have Overcome Fears of Digitalization

© Daniil Prokofyev/ HSE University

The majority of Russian university teachers were prepared for the emergency and online teaching during the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown period. However, they consider remote teaching more time-consuming and less convenient than face-to-face instruction. This is evidenced by a recent survey of the HSE Centre for Institutional Research.

The results of the survey which analyzed Russian university teachers’ attitudes to the transition to online instruction and remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic were published in Information Bulletin No. 4 2021 of the Monitoring of Educational Markets and Organizations project. In June 2020, 1,707 teachers from 93 universities were surveyed. The questions focused on the online educational process, difficulties that teachers faced, and the preparedness of universities and their employees for the recent changes.

The nationwide survey showed that Russian universities have withstood the crisis and demonstrated a high level of preparedness for the emergency. Answering the question, ‘To what extent were teachers of your university prepared for the urgent shift to online teaching’, 14.1% of respondents said that they had been ‘fully prepared’, 57.2% had been ‘mostly prepared’, while only 4.4% appeared to have been ‘entirely unprepared’. About 20% of respondents mentioned a lack of preparedness among their universities’ administration and teachers.

Meanwhile, over 80% of respondents pointed out that remote work was more time-consuming and the traditional way of teaching their courses would have been a better option, while 70% said that the new format was less convenient for both them and their students. Only 2.8% of respondents agreed with the statement ‘Remote working has given me more leisure time’. More than half (57%) of respondents believe that the current situation with online teaching may weaken the quality of higher education.

The survey participants were also asked to assess their universities’ management and administration in terms of how well the online teaching process had been organized. 24.8% of the respondents were ‘very satisfied’ with their managers and administrators, 56.1% were ‘mostly satisfied’, 15.2% were ‘mostly dissatisfied’, and 3.9% reported that they were ‘very dissatisfied’.

The authors of the survey say that the transition to remote work due to the pandemic turned out to be one of the biggest real-life experiments in the history of higher education both in Russia and across the globe. The effectiveness of various digital technologies in education has been long discussed by experts and academics. However, the Russian survey shows that before the coronavirus pandemic, teachers thought it would be a long time before people would enjoy the benefits of total digitalization and remote studying.

The researchers underscored the importance of further evaluation of the state of higher education in the new conditions, continued monitoring the attitudes of various participants of the educational process to the current situation, and identifying opportunities to mitigate the anticipated adverse effects—all from the point of view of educational results and students and professors’ experience.