Shifting from Face-to-Face to Online Teaching During COVID-19: The Role of University Faculty Achievement Goals for Attitudes Towards This Sudden Change, and Their Relevance for Burnout/Engagement and Student Evaluations of Teaching Quality

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many higher education faculty members were required to abruptly shift from face-to-face to online teaching. Within this, some instructors managed well, while others struggled. To elucidate interindividual differences in online teaching and learn-ing during this unexpected circumstance, we focus on faculty members’ attitudes towards this shift and examine their associations with underlying motivations as well as burnout/engagement and student learning. We analyzed longitudinal data of 80 faculty members’ achievement goals during the semester prior to shifting to online teaching, and their attitudes and burn-out/engagement during the first semester with enforced online teaching. Additionally, we used 703 student ratings of these faculty members’ teaching quality in terms of student learning. Re-sults indicated that learning approach goals of faculty were positively associated with perceiving the shift to online teaching as a positive challenge and as useful for their own competence de-velopment. Conversely, performance (appearance) avoidance goals and work avoidance goals went along with perceiving this change as threatening, which, in turn, was related to increased burnout levels and students reporting their learning to be worse. Taken together, these findings point to the relevance of faculty goals and attitudes for successful online teaching and learning.