key: cord-0907020-q28lv43x authors: Siddiquei, Mohd. Imran; Kathpal, Shashank title: Challenges of online teaching during Covid‐19: An exploratory factor analysis date: 2021-10-28 journal: Hum Behav Emerg Technol DOI: 10.1002/hbe2.300 sha: 621d799b7b0fa283e71385d22fb0adbbf8551a94 doc_id: 907020 cord_uid: q28lv43x Covid‐19 has forced academic institutions around the world to shift toward the digital platform for teaching. The study aimed to find a possible model to understand the challenges of online teaching from home. Literature review and expert opinion identified the issues related to students, institutions, instructors, technology, and content, and based on the expert's opinion, the motivation construct was added. To obtain the data faculty members of different universities of North India were approached and requested to fill a self‐administered questionnaire. This data was analyzed for its reliability and validity. Finally, the factor loading of all the items was analyzed to determine the scale appropriability. The spread of the coronavirus epidemic is responsible for the cause of medical emergencies all over the world, due to which millions are suffering from the disease and more than half of the millions have died. The entire world economy has been crushed by . Its spread has caused panic in almost all sectors of the world economy (Ali & Khan, 2020) . A nationwide lockdown was announced in India on 22 March 2020 to prevent the epidemic from spreading in the country. Thousands of school colleges and universities have had to be closed due to lockdown in India. Lockdown has affected the education of more than 500 million students in India (Gupta & Tiwari, 2020) . Lockdown has forced colleges, universities, and schools all over India to take entire education to the digital platform without any preparations. It has pushed the academic institutions towards online teaching due to the indefinite shutting down of schools, colleges, and universities by the governments (Martinez, 2020) . The closure of schools has affected more than 290 million students across the globe (UNESCO, 2020) . The education industry has witnessed a pedagogical shift in the teaching toward e-learning to cope up with the challenges posed by . The issue of students' safety compelled academic institutions to devise strategies for educating students with nominal disruptions (Hale et al., 2020) . The teachers were aware of using technology for enhanced learning; however, they were not ready for such revolutionary change. The education system was obligated to reinvent itself to handle this unparalleled challenge. Earlier the e-learning was majorly used in nonformal education and distance education courses. However, the Covid-19 has compelled the formal institutions to embrace e-learning, as maintaining social distance is of utmost value. Maintaining stringent rules such as maintaining social distancing is improbable in the regular classroom mode of teaching. The motivation of different stakeholders is a prerequisite to breaking the ice of interaction that occurs due to the absence of regular classes (Siegal et al., 1996) . Both the teachers and students need to adopt the digital learning process to make elearning successful (Lederman, 2020) . The sudden change from a brick-and-mortar model to only a click model of education and learning has posed serious challenges in front of teachers and students (Adnan & Anwar, 2020; Bdair, 2021) . For students in India, the challenges are not limited to technological infrastructure, but it extends to psychological well-being as well (Pandita et al., 2021) . The psychological impact of online teaching among students includes anxiety, and depression (Bashir et al., 2020; Hasan & Bao, 2020; Pandita et al., 2021) . The Government of India promoted online teaching to ensure the continuation of learning even during the lockdown. Chinese government emphasized continuous learning even during the suspension of classes in the time of Covid-19 (Zhang et al., 2020) . The emphasis on digital teaching has burdened all the stakeholders of the education industry. A shift toward remote teaching at such short notice globally was a novel phenomenon (Brom et al., 2020) . These types of emergencies are not planned and require the competency of using technology to teach remotely (Joshi et al., 2018; Rush et al., 2016) . Many teachers are struggling to adopt online teaching (Hodges et al., 2020) . The conventional view suggests that instructors and probably the textbook are the primary source of students' information. Information and Communication Technology(ICT) support, such as audio/videos or slides, or films, is available to teachers. Online teaching is different because the instructor is not there to make students vigilant. The elearning system makes the role of the teacher more complex, as teachers have to collect, prepare, and present the information via the internet as a course facilitator (Adedoyin & Soykan, 2020; Bdair, 2021; Buzzetto-Hollywood, 2007) . The complexity of online teaching has increased the workload of teachers many folds (Adnan & Anwar, 2020; Connolly & Begg, 2006) . Post lockdown majority of the educational institutions adopted either synchronous learning or asynchronous learning models. Synchronous learning consists of online or remote training that takes place in real-time in the form of live sessions using various conferencing software's like zoom, google meet, Blackboard, Skype, and Cisco WebEx, while online learning is achieved without real-time contact through online networks using WhatsApp, YouTube, and Learning management systems of educational institutes. Both synchronous and asynchronous models require hardware, software, and network supports for both teachers and students. The recent report from Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) suggested that Internet infrastructure in India is not ready for a complete shift from offline teaching to online teaching (Source: QS I -GUAGE). Even before Covid-19 pandemic, developing countries like India were facing challenges and many obstacles in adopting e-learning (Heeks, 2002) . The challenges have become more prominent as the entire education system shifted from offline to online teaching. There have been numerous studies that have been conducted to understand the quality of e-learning from different perspectives. Critical questions such as communication, technology, time management, pedagogy, and evaluation have been identified and analyzed through various studies on online teaching (Bassoppo-Moyo, 2006; Conaway et al., 2005; Ko & Rossen, 2010; Limperos et al., 2015) . However, challenges faced by educators in the era of Covid-19 have been less explored (Adedoyin & Soykan, 2020; Adnan & Anwar, 2020) . The objective of this study is to understand the challenges of online teaching from home in the education sector. Almost all the major countries have adopted e-learning in the post- (Adedoyin & Soykan, 2020; Adnan & Anwar, 2020; Bdair, 2021) . While each of these constructs and elements looks important and relevant but it is unclear that which construct and element will be suitable to, measure the challenges of online teaching from home in the era of Covid-19. Therefore, with the help of a literature review, a list of constructs and items has been prepared ( Table 1 ). The literature contributed five important factors like instructors, institutions, learners, infrastructure, content factors that are crucial as challenges of teaching online. The factor of motivation, which is recommended by the experts, can be viewed from a different point of view including the role of the instructor, the process of learning, the environment of learning, and the role of participants. Researchers have looked at motivational variables as significant indicators of desire to continue with any form of technologyassisted education (Panisoara et al., 2020) . Since the target sample for this study is faculty members working in private universities, motivation factors become more imminent from the Indian perspective as these institutions are known for their exploitative policies (Sindhi, 2012) . We took those factors that affect the motivation of faculty members which are salary, job security, family support, mental, and emotional support. A paucity of research was found which could incorporate the challenges that emerge out of the present pandemic in the life of a faculty, to adopt online teaching. Therefore, to fill the existing research gap, the study will propose the model to understand the challenges faced in online teaching during Covid-19. The proposed model "Challenges of Online Teaching during-COVID 19" has been designed to understand problems faced by instructors/ teachers in the delivery of online lectures to the students in the Covid-19 scenario. The following nine steps were undertaken to propose the model ( Figure 1 ). 1. Literature review: Review of literature is one of the prominent and effective ways to find out the factors and measures used in determining any phenomenon (Knopf, 2006) . The first step of conceptual definitions, their elements, and description started with a literature review of existing studies in the online teaching domain. More than 50 studies were reviewed to understand conceptual definitions, that can be a theoretical base for model for evaluation of the relevance of each item, reclassify the items, point out ambiguity, and suggest a replacement or additional items (Devellis, 1991) . Experts have suggested a new factor as motivation with five items including salary, job security, family support, mental, and emotional support to incorporate challenges that arise due to Covid-19. Some minor changes have also been suggested by experts like network speed and online counseling sessions for teachers, which are peculiar to Indian Internet infrastructure and stress-relieving exercises for teachers. used to examine the challenges of online teaching were finalized after the extensive review of the existing literature and with the help of experts in the field (Bohrnstedt, 1983) . A total of six factors (instructors, institutions, students/learners, infrastructure, content factors, and motivational factors) with five items each were constructed for the final development of a questionnaire. All the items were measure on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from "Strongly disagree To Strongly Agree." The questionnaire was also verified with the experts of the field who helped in finalizing factors (Caro & Garcia, 2007) . 5 . Face and content validity: Content validity of a questionnaire comes from the review of literature while face validity could be achieved by considering expert opinion (Taherdoost, 2016) . All the items were taken from the extensive literature review and (Marsh et al., 2009) . The normality was also tested by analyzing the skewness of data before running EFA. 8. Factors determination: The eigenvalues of the 30 items were calculated to determine the number of factors to be considered for the study. A scree plot is also created for the same. 9. Exploratory factor analysis: To have a reliable scale, the items selected must be suitable. With the help of EFA, inappropriate items can be removed. The EFA is a very useful tool to categorize the constructs when there is a paucity of information available on their dimensionality (Netemeyer et al., 2003) . The scale for the proposed model was analyzed with the help of EFA using the software of SPSS 20. A total number of 30 items were finalized to represent the six latent variables used to run the EFA. A sample of 115 respondents is taken, which is considered to be suitable to conduct EFA (Churchill Jr, 1979; Hair et al., 2010; Malhotra & Das, 2010) . The EFA analysis was conducted over Principal Component Analysis (PCA) using the Varimax rotation while analyzing the principal component. The current study aims to investigate the suitability of the proposed model as well as the items included in it. The data collected were analyzed using SPSS 20 has indicated the following findings: The normality of the items is confirmed by analyzing the skewness of the data which is created using SPSS 20. If the degree of skewness is less than the absolute 1, the data is considered to be normally distributed (Field, 2009) . Table 2 shows that the data used in the study is normally distributed. If the value of Cronbach's alpha is higher than 0.8, it is considered to have very good internal consistency (Blunch, 2008) , while Nunnally (1994), considers the value of 0.7 as reliable. The outcome values of Cronbach's alpha for the current study ranges from 0.886 to 0.936, indicating good reliability of the data (Table 3 ). The acceptable value for the KMO test should be greater than 0.6 (Hair et al., 2010; Kaiser, 1974; Tabachnick & Fidell, 2013) . The result of KMO analysis was 0.880 (Table 4) , which is an acceptable value to run PCA in EFA. The result for Bartlett's Test was having a p-value of .00, which is also considered significant. The total variance of each latent variable is characterized by eigenvalue. According to Kaiser (1960) , factors with an eigenvalue of more than 1 is should be considered for retention. The eigenvalue for six factors was found to be greater than 1 (Table 5 ) and the same is confirmed by using a scree plot ( Figure 2 ). While 24 variables did not qualified to be considered as factors, because their eigenvalue is less than 1 (DeVellis, 2003). The same results can be seen in the scree test, where the six factors are seen on a vertical slope ( Figure 2 ) and hence considered for the retention (Comrey & Lee, 1992; DeVellis, 2003) . EFA is used to develop new instruments. Comrey and Lee (1992) suggested that if the factor loading is more than 0.63, it is considered to be good. As shown in Tables 6 and 7, all of the 30 items of the given five constructs have shown a very good factor loading value ranging from .662 to .858, which reflects a robust correlation between variables and factors. Due to the outstanding results of EFA, all the items were retained and none were removed. This study aims to analyze the challenges faced by the academicians in shift their teaching pedagogy from traditional to online mode due This pandemic has given many lessons to every industry including education. An important takeaway for education institutes is to be prepared for effective digital learning. valuable. During the emergencies such as Covid-19, remote teaching could be proven a feasible substitute for traditional teaching. However, its effectiveness could only be studied in the future by analyzing the performance of students. The performance of students could deteriorate due to the challenges posed by this new method of education. In the end, it is essential to address the challenges posed in the adoption of digital learning to make it effective. Literature indicates a poor ability of faculties in using digital platforms for teaching (Foulger et al., 2017) . The faculties who were not versed with online teaching faced enormous challenges, as they need to learn teaching online while delivering the lectures online. Despite the difficulties, the digital platform for teaching provides opportunities to faculties for experimental teaching, as teaching in different setups and platforms was possible (Archambault & Kennedy, 2014; Graham et al., 2019; Pulham & Graham, 2018; Zweig & Stafford, 2016) . The faculty members were motivated to support the shift toward e-learning (Trust et al., 2016) . This study will bridge the gap of existing literature on major challenges of online teaching from home in post-Covid-19 scenarios. As social distancing has become the norm, this study will help higher institutions to understand major challenges and try to come up with strategies for a better online learning environment for students and faculty members by focusing on factors that can be solved at an institutional level like counseling, adequate training, job security. The study will also help the government to focus on a critical area like Indian Internet infrastructure which plays an important role in the success of online teaching and learning in India. Finally, it helps faculty members as they are responsible for service delivery. They can employ innovative teaching strategies to improve students' participation and interaction in online classes. The study is not without any limitations. The study was conducted in the Indian context; therefore, generalization for other countries is limited. The study employs a small sample size due to limitations of accessibility to respondents due to Covid-19; therefore future can explore factors with greater sample sizes. Future research must try confirmatory factor analysis to validate the proposed model further. The study can be replicated in other developing countries due to the existence of a similar type of challenge, which can further improve the acceptability of the proposed model. 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Technological Factors 1 My network connection is having adequate speed. 3. My device (mobile/laptop) are suitable for online teaching. 4. My video conferencing software (Zoom, Google meet, Skype, Blackboard) is easy to use Google meet, Skype, Blackboard) are having adequate tools for online teaching. Source: Prepared By the Authors