Associate Professor The George Washington University Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Abstract: The trend of digital transformation reshapes and advances the need for online education in higher education institutions. This literature review study that explored factors that contribute to and hinder faculty online teaching readiness, revealed that from a human resource development (HRD) perspective, appropriate and relevant support for online teaching needs to be provided by faculty development professionals, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, which has significantly changed the landscape of online teaching in higher education. The findings of this study showed that online teaching readiness is influenced by faculty’s technical competencies, their teaching beliefs and attitudes, and by the cultural and structural contexts in which they work. The findings offer insights to HRD professionals as well as leaders in higher education in designing training and development programs to prepare faculty for online teaching and in implementing cultural and structural changes to build supportive environments for fostering faculty online teaching readiness. Research shows that in addition to the development of online teaching pedagogy and technological skills, environments that support safe and trustworthy relationship are essential in helping eliminate faculty’s fear and vulnerability in switching to online teaching. Addressing individual faculty needs should be also complemented by processes and policies that reward teaching innovation and connect online teaching excellence to faculty career advancement. Perception-based competency measurement studies do not reflect the actual needs of faculty and are not able to explain why or why not faculty are competent to teach online, thus qualitative studies are called for in-depth understanding of these issues.
