Best Practices for New Online Management Education Instructors to Overcome Resistance to Online Teaching : New Insights

Enrollment in online courses has increased rapidly in the last two decades, and exponentially in the last few years (Seaman, Allen, & Allen, 2018) as part of an e-revolution, especially in business schools (Kumar, Kumar, Palvia, & Verma, 2019), in which access to and use of information technology has become widespread. Instructors are one of the most important variables in online teaching as they function as the source of content for, and facilitators of, the online course. Some faculty, however, are ambivalent about teaching online for a variety of reasons (Mitchell, Parlamis, & Claiborne, 2015), and this ambivalence can be the impetus for the failure of the online course implementation. In addition, although research (“No significant difference”, n.d.) demonstrates that learning in online classes is comparable to learning in on-ground courses, instructors’ attitudes toward online teaching remain divided. In this chapter, I offer a brief review of Mitchell et al. (2015) and its general recommendations for management educators to help overcome their resistance to online teaching. I then expand upon what was previously written by sharing specific recommendations and resources focused on faculty, and for administrators to use with faculty, as they attempt the change to online teaching. To this end, I begin with a discussion of the notion of fit in the context of selecting faculty with a particular set of characteristics that are best suited to teaching online courses. The next portion of the chapter offers a research-derived list of best practices for new online instructors – addressing both hard and soft issues. Next, the discussion continues with a brief review of additional factors pertinent to teaching online but not included in the previous list. This will include topics gleaned both from research and over a decade and a half of personal online and hybrid experience as a management educator