Covid pandemic as a disruptive factor enhancing ICT use in social sciences’ teaching practices

Purpose: Our research attempts to understand a change in social sciences’ academics' teaching practices that can be observed during the COVID pandemic and that are predicted after the pandemic. Design: We investigate – in the light of the Blin’s and Munro’s activity theory (2008) – whether the COVID pandemic is a disruptive factor that may lead to the transformation of social sciences academics’ teaching practices. The research instrument was a worldwide survey conducted among social sciences’ academics. Findings: COVID pandemic has already introduced changes into academics’ teaching practices in a form of broad ICT usage as well as initiated changes in the teaching activities design. Research limitations: The number of responses is limited to 382 with only a collection of 77 responses from outside of Europe. We applied a general approach for ICT means not asking respondents about particular ICT tools. COVID as a pandemic evolves continuously indicating the need for further, in-depth research in this field. Practical implications: COVID pandemic might serve as a disruptive factor enforcing further changes in social sciences’ academic teaching practices after the pandemic. Social implications: Our results indicate that the quality of social sciences teaching has worsened during the pandemic and most of the respondents do not predict significant changes in the quality of teaching after the pandemic compared to the quality of teaching before the pandemic. Originality: We contribute by showing that introduction of a new tool (ICT) and modified teaching activity design resulted in a serious alteration of the teaching practice of social sciences’ academics. We did not confirm that COVID disruption was expansive enough to permanently transform teaching practices of social sciences academics, hence we suggest that obstacles to successful incorporation of ICT in teaching practices are still present. We showed that ICT is predicted to be used more frequently rather than before (when it was only utilised as a platform to transfer traditional material) and will not modify the well-established practices referring to instructional tools. Our study suggests that the relation between teacher and teaching activity design is not mediated by ICT tools, which may result in resistance from the teachers.