The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore faculty members’ accounts of their experiences as first-time online instructors during the Spring 2020 academic semester as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting mandatory shift to online instruction. The rapid and widespread nature of the outbreak created an unprecedented phenomenon that significantly impacted instructors with no prior experience teaching courses in a fully online fashion. I interviewed 10 professors from various disciplines with at least three years of teaching experience in the traditional classroom. Each instructor was asked to express how the pandemic affected them personally as well as how the mandatory shift to online instruction affected their teaching style. They were also asked to describe the role that institutional support played in their experiences during the pandemic and to share their feelings regarding how COVID-19 has altered the future of higher education. The analysis of this data identified the following common themes: the instructor, the discipline, the students, survival and adaptation, innovation and evolution, on-camera presence and etiquette, synchronous versus asynchronous, administrative leadership, technical support, the new normal and the lasting effects, the balance between in-person and remote instruction, and the notion that higher education is moving forward to a new reality rather than backward to a pre-COVID-19 atmosphere. These results can benefit institutional leadership and faculty in the development of hybrid and online courses.

Even before the spread of COVID-19 video conferencing software has seen a steady rise in use. Due to their convenient way of offering a way of seeing the other participants live while talking to them, it is quite easy to see why this kind of software became more and more used throughout the years. Now, during the pandemic, video conferencing software is more used than ever before, especially in learning environments. Nevertheless, studies show that student engagement is rather low with university students who take part in online learning. Throughout this paper, we venture into discovering the reasons behind this lack of engagement and how it can be improved from a User Experience Design standpoint. With findings resulted from several previous studies and identified student problems and needs from those papers we created a prototype to test which features and design elements affected student engagement.