Needs analysis: Current situation and forced transition to emergency remote teaching on one hand, created opportunities, on the other has served as an augmented contextual space to help us understand the needs of educators. The need to study Covid-19 practices and reflecting on the lessons learned is highlighted in the new European Digital Education Action plan, as well as the need to share practice and experience and the need for guidance for a short, medium and long term perspective. As this project aims to help the academic faculty to shift their teaching and learning practices from ERT to digital pedagogy, we first need to understand the domain and country-specific status quo in the current situation in order to address the fundamental problems in the faculty development in the current context and to plan for future digital education readiness. The current educational crisis has, on the one hand, turned existing, widespread practices in higher education upside down, while on the other, existing knowledge in the field of digital education, and especially in distance learning, has been largely ignored. In short, the academic staff all found themselves in unknown territory. The majority of academic staff have adopted synchronous and knowledge transfer paradigms in teaching; to respond to the need for quality education, practitioners must know effective teaching methods but also be able to participate in reflective practices.

Target groups: 150 university staff per partner country (out of a total of 500 lecturers) selected from all subject areas

Elements of innovation and transferability potential: Carrying out of a qualitative and quantitative study based on different European countries will be crucial to assess and subsequently address the perceived need for an evidence-based approach to digital education among lecturers working in countries that differ in cultural aspects, familiarity with information and communication technologies and country-specific problems. The data set is not only crucial for IO2, but can also be used as an evidence base for the framework and guidelines addressing the different needs of higher education staff in Europe, and can be further improved and implemented by incorporating the analysis in other European partners.

Expected impact: The main objective of this IO is to conduct a situation analysis of the faculty of the partner countries HEI. This analysis will be used in IO2, IO3, IO4, and IO5 to provide the framework for targeted training, guidelines, resource pack, and MOOCs.

How: During its research phase, the project will identify, on one hand, existing best practices in the HEIs and especially target the academic staff that had experiences to share within the emergency remote teaching and on the other, academic staff that have had problems with the transition and define exact needs they have had. This way will connect two types of academic personnel, especially in similar subjects, to benefit from and enrich the community-based platform. Individual, semi-structured, qualitative interviews with academics (5 per country) will create a basis for the topics in the survey research. Composition and implementation of a survey aimed at 150 lecturers for each participating country, collecting information about country-specific experiences on ERT, its shortcomings, perceived needs of academic staff as well as mapping their starting relevant competencies to implement digital pedagogies. The survey will also investigate the situation in the partner countries about evidence-based teaching practices, especially with regards to cognitive processes behind learning online. The data will be analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. Along with the data analytics and visualisation techniques of open and close questions, natural language processing and machine learning techniques will also be used for the process of data analysis. These will be especially used for identifying common groups who share the same experiences or opinions to facilitate the interpretation of the results.

Steps:

IO1.1 Qualitative interviews

IO1.2 Survey creation and validation

IO1.3 Survey results analysis

IO1.4 Final analytical report

Partners involvement: The University of Southampton is going to lead this IO. They will lead the initial survey draft, editing of the survey document in English, monitoring and supporting all the processes included in the IO. Analysis and the final report of the survey will be done by Bitlis Eren University and the University of Foggia. All University Partners: Participating organisation. Participation in the survey creation through discussion, feedback and suggestions.Validation of the survey document. Translation of the survey in the country national language (if needed). Individual, semi-structured interviews with academics (5 per country). Identification of 150 academic staff to whom the survey will be sent. Responsibility in ensuring the representativeness of the sample. Administration of the survey. Responsibility in ensuring that a sufficient number of surveys are completed and transmitted to the local partner university (>120). Data analysis of country-specific survey and translation of the database in English, if needed.