Assessing Online Teaching Experience during the Covid-19 Pandemic: With Special Reference to the Lecturers Specialized in Management, Sri Lanka

Abstract

The entire world was terrifically affected by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020/21 at different levels. However, almost all the industries including tourism, manufacturing, apparel, education and banking, and finance were utterly affected by this situation. The education sector can be recognized as one of the key sectors deleteriously affected by the pandemic as it created a lot of complications in all the spheres of educational operations including delivering lectures, holding examinations, and conducting assignments. Most of the countries introduced the working from the home concept which was also applied to the education sector as well. Hence; the main objective of this research was to assess the online teaching experience of the Management faculty lecturers in Sri Lanka. This study further explores the difficulties and benefits of online teaching experienced by the lecturers, the level of satisfaction and acceptance of online teaching for future purposes. The findings suggest that lecturers were provided different levels of technical support from their relevant institutes and used different combinations of tools for online teaching. The study further revealed that the main advantage was flexible hours, while; lack of student engagement; lack of face-to-face interactions, internet connection, and technical problems were the most common difficulties. Furthermore, it was found that lecturers were partially satisfied with online education but showed higher acceptance of online education in the future.