Nudge or not, university teachers have mixed feelings about online teaching

Sanchayan Banerjee; Beatriz Jambrina-Canseco; Benjamin Brundu-Gonzalez; Claire Gordon; Jenni Carr

doi:10.1057/s41599-023-01691-1

Nudge or not, university teachers have mixed feelings about online teaching

Humanit Soc Sci Commun. 2023;10(1):232. doi: 10.1057/s41599-023-01691-1. Epub 2023 May 12.

Authors

Sanchayan Banerjee^{1

2}, Beatriz Jambrina-Canseco², Benjamin Brundu-Gonzalez², Claire Gordon², Jenni Carr²

Affiliations

¹ Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
² London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.

Abstract

We designed and administered an online survey experiment to 444 educators in a large social sciences university in the United Kingdom to evaluate their perceptions on the effectiveness of online teaching methods. We find that a nudge, designed to inform educators about the benefits of online teaching, does not improve the personal evaluations of educators in our sample (n_treat = 142, n_control = 142) about this new mode of teaching. Overall, most respondents in our sample report being comfortable with online teaching methods and think this form of teaching can continue to have some positive impact. Nonetheless, they do not favour any further online transition away from traditional modes of teaching. Online teaching is largely perceived by a majority of these educators to negatively affect student well-being and their overall university experience. We call for more experimental research in higher educational settings to evaluate the role of edunudges in improving the uptake of online teaching tools.

Keywords: Education; Psychology.