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The global Covid 19-pandemic led to many challenges for higher education (HE) teachers but at the same time provided an opportunity to not only re-evaluate a previously unquestioned teaching culture, but to point to the need to fundamentally question the capabilities of HE institutions and teachers to implement digitally supported education at the organizational, teaching, and learning levels. In this study, we analyzed data from 1,339 HE teachers’ conclusions for post pandemic teaching in the light of instructional course quality. Our findings shed light on HE teachers’ mindsets toward traditional face-to-face and online teaching as well as (im)probable changes in academic teaching culture. Our results offer a “bottom up”- basis for recommendations of how institutions may support their faculty for digital transformations in HE, based on teachers’ expertise and perceptions of the advantages and hindrances of HE online teaching.

First-generation students (FGS) are more likely to feel misplaced and struggle at university than students with university-educated parents (continuous-generation students; CGS). We assumed that the shutdowns during the Coronavirus-pandemic would particularly threaten FGS due to obstructed coping mechanisms. Specifically, FGS may show lower identification with the academic setting and lower perceived fairness of the university system (system justification). We investigated whether FGS and CGS used different defenses to cope with the shutdown threat in a large sample of German-speaking students (N = 848). Using Structural Equation Modeling, we found that for all students, independent of academic parental background, high levels of system justification were associated with perceiving the learning situation as less threatening, better coping with failure, and less helplessness. However, in comparison to CGS, FGS showed small but significant reductions in system justification and relied more on concrete personal relationships with other students as well as their academic identity to cope with the threatening situation. We discuss implications for helping FGS succeed at university.

Appeared in: Open Search Symposium 2021, 11-13 October 2021, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland.

von Julius Möller Literaturverzeichnis: Blatt 52-57 Masterarbeit Paris-Lodron-Universität Salzburg 2020 Abstract in deutscher und englischer Sprache