2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Public health measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a series of involuntary changes in teaching and learning from 2020 to 2022, which could have promoted instructional development among instructors in postsecondary education. In this research paper, we used the four components in Kirkpatrick’s model of training evaluation—reactions, learning, behaviour, and results—to examine the data collected in summer 2022 from instructors of an engineering school of a public Canadian university. The analysis directed us to the following observations about the instructional development among faculty members in the engineering school during the pandemic. The teaching practices in most of the courses changed and most instructors consulted with resources for instructional support during the pandemic. The crisis during the pandemic serendipitously offered an unprecedented opportunity for instructional development toward online teaching. The instructional development is characterized by instructors’ reactions to their own online teaching experiences, positive attitudinal changes and skill development among some instructors with respect to online teaching, as well as the alternative teaching practices that emerged during the pandemic. However, this instructional development was passive and reactive in nature, and will not reverse the typical in-person course delivery in engineering. In addition, instructors in the engineering school accessed school-based resources for instructional support more often than university-based resources; and this resource access pattern will be likely to continue. Implications of these findings for instructional development are discussed.