Abstract

COVID-19 forced all education online during Spring 2020 requiring face-to-face higher education faculty to immediately redesign their courses for an online modality. This dissertation studied faculty who used Canvas as their Learning Management System to investigate how faculty leveraged affordances and navigated constraints of the platform, specifically in Pages and Assignments, when they designed and redesigned their courses; how their pedagogical and Canvas training affected their choices; and the ways in which their experiences affected their workload and stress levels. This study employed a three-phase methodology: a) a Qualtrics survey with open and closed-ended questions; b) 11 faculty were interviewed; and, c) Canvas course sandboxes of the interviewees were observed via Zoom. The results indicate that although the majority of faculty had some kind of pedagogical or Canvas training prior to the pandemic, they felt extreme stress and higher workload during spring, but lower stress and workload during summer as they prepared for fall since they had more time to work. The majority of faculty worked nonstop throughout 2020, even during their Spring Breaks and summer vacations; they did so without additional pay while writing, designing, and redesigning courses, and only a few faculty were paid for additional summer training. The research was analyzed through a convergent framework of Critical Digital Pedagogy, Interface, and Affordance theories, which formed the Pandemic Teaching Cycle and development of a new educational affordance taxonomy.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2021

Semester

Fall

Advisor

Salter, Anastasia

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Arts and Humanities

Degree Program

Texts and Technology

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0008862; DP0026141

URL

https://purls.library.ucf.edu/go/DP0026141

Language

English

Release Date

December 2021

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)

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