Abstract

The purpose of this qualitative study was to get a better understanding of faculty members' views on the future of higher education by their first-time online teaching experiences during the Fall 2021 academic semester, which was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the outbreak's rapid and widespread dissemination, it created a unique phenomenon that had a significant impact on faculty members who had no prior experience teaching courses entirely online. In order to conduct this qualitative research, purposive sampling was used to choose ten faculty members from a variety of disciplines who had at least ten years of experience teaching in a traditional classroom setting at a public university in Izmir, Turkey. Faculty members were asked about the future of higher education in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Apart from that, each faculty member was asked to discuss how the mandatory shift to online education altered their teaching style and how institutional help impacted their experiences throughout the pandemic. As a consequence of their observations and statements of their perspectives on events they witnessed and personally experienced, the key issue of "transformation of higher education with hybrid perspective" developed as a central theme. The data analysis revealed the following subthemes: "educators on the internet," "sustain and evolve," and "university support". These findings may be applied in a variety of contexts, including educational leadership and the design of hybrid and online courses, among other applications in higher education.

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