Nursing faculty readiness to teach online: a survey of nursing educators from Saudi Arabia and the UK

The use of online teaching has witnessed a rapid expansion in the last few years, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a significant impact on the student’s and Faculty’s learning and teaching experience, but also on the nurses’ long-term practice. Nurses are increasingly practicing in digitally driven work environments that require complex digital skills and capabilities [1].

Learning Management System (LMS), which is the main platform for delivering online teaching, plays a pivotal role in higher education’s teaching paradigm, and this role has become more critical with the sudden shift to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, where some educational institutions have managed to switch more quickly, and others have shown more resilience when to it came to initiating online teaching whilst maintaining the quality of their teaching to the best possible standards [2]. Choi et al. [3] conducted a study to examine the laboratory and clinical teaching experiences of Korean Nursing Faculty during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nineteen nursing faculty members from different Korean universities participated in 4 focus group interviews. Thematic analysis revealed several themes including Acceptance of change, and preparing for future practice training. The findings confirmed the need and feasibility of non-face-to-face education; hence it is imperative that classes utilizing technology will be actively developed for nurse education. The participants in this study were all females, so the extent of how the gender role has shaped the participants’ views remains unclear.

The Blackboard system has emerged as one of the most widely used LMS in many universities in Saudi Arabia, with 87% of the Saudi universities successfully integrating the Blackboard Learn^® platform into their educational curriculum[4]. Many of these universities have a dedicated Deanship of E-learning which provides substantial support to both Faculty members and students to facilitate the use of the Blackboards platform, and when it comes to utilizing online digital platforms for learning, the nursing students’ access to digital knowledge, skills, and technology is said to be critical for successful delivery and utilization of learning [1]. Equally, however, the role of nursing academic staff, and their pedagogical readiness and performance to teach online, was also reported to be a pre-requisite for effective online teaching[5]. Ibrahim and his colleagues [6] examined Faculty members’ perceptions of using Blackboard in the teaching system at one University in Saudi Arabia. 174 Faculty members from several colleges were invited to complete an online survey (including Nursing Faculty) on their perceived usefulness, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenges toward the use of the Blackboard. The results showed that Faculty members had an overall positive attitude toward the implementation of the Blackboard system, although there was no differential analysis to identify the Nursing Faculty views toward their level of competence in using the Blackboard platform for teaching. The findings stressed the importance of periodically training Faculty members and students on the use of the Blackboard system. In other countries such as the UK, the most frequently used virtual learning environments by higher education institutions are Moodle (51%), Blackboard (20%), and Canvas (19%)[7].

Castro et al. [8] evaluated the nursing educators’ and students’ perspectives on the change in teaching approaches to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. A cross-sectional study recruited 120 nursing instructors and 350 nursing students from five higher academic institutions in Saudi Arabia between November and December 2020. The participants were asked to complete the Test of e-Learning Related Attitudes Scale. The findings indicate that both nursing students and Faculty share similar very positive attitudes toward online learning and teaching.

Published evidence from the literature pointed out to the international comparisons among Faculty members on the use of online teaching. Martin et al. [9] investigated Faculty perspectives in the US and Germany regarding their preparedness to teach online. Overall, the US Faculty gave the competencies higher ratings in terms of perceived relevance and self-efficacy than the German Faculty did. Based on factors like gender, training, degree of teaching, and age, there were significant variations in how important the Nursing Faculty thought their competencies were. When it came to self-efficacy, there were big differences in the Faculty’s age, years of experience teaching online, and teaching style (synchronous, asynchronous, or hybrid).

Nursing Faculty are bound to have the relevant digital skills that lead to successful delivery of nursing education. Nashwan et al. [10] pointed out that the COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly brought forth significant difficulties and uncertainty for nursing education, but there is an unequivocal need to adjust to the “new norm” to better prepare the next generation of nurses and nursing students to meet global health challenges. In this context, an international comparison of the Nursing Faculty’s readiness to teach online is likely to provide a significant perspective, and in post COVID-19 era, this knowledge is critical to showcase the diverse approaches to online learning environments, the strengths of these approaches, capacities that some institutions are utilizing and areas which may need further professional development considerations.

Saudi Arabia is undergoing rapid transformation in its health system and education sector. Allmnakrah & Evers [11] reported that Saudi Arabia is one of those nations that implemented Vision 2030 intending to diversify its economy and improve teaching programs. Saudi Arabian Vision 2030 has emphasized the integration of modern technology and digital solutions into most sectors, including health education [12]. With increased demands for well-trained nursing professionals, there is an imminent call for the adoption of more innovative and adaptive teaching methods such as online education to effectively meet such demand. Arguably, the readiness of nursing educators within Saudi Arabia to embrace online teaching methods is critical to inform policies and strategies that can best support this transition in ensuring a high-quality nursing education.

In the context of the UK, adopting online teaching in higher education has also gained momentum in the last two decades, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Cutri et al. [13] study found that the UK represents a state with an established tradition of online education and a properly developed healthcare system. Having been among the leading countries applying online teaching methods within their institutions of higher education for quite a long time, Henshall et al. [14] argue that UK higher education institutions have built up valuable insights and models that would be effective in implementation. As most of the nursing programs have shifted a portion of their activities online, the UK can be taken as a standard for measuring some of the challenges and successes associated with the subject of online nursing education. Comparison between Saudi Arabia and UK faculty readiness gives insight into the global landscape of online nursing education. It, therefore, opens potential ways for cross-cultural learning and collaboration, hence contributing to universally developing nursing education.

To date, no study has examined the level of readiness for online teaching among Nursing Faculty across both the UK and Saudi Arabia. The current study aims to bridge this gap in the literature.

The purpose of this study is to examine the Nursing Faculty’s level of readiness to teach online among a sample of nursing educators from Saudi Arabia and the UK.

This study adopted a quantitative methodology, using a self-reported and cross-sectional survey design for data collection. The study is broadly reported based on the STROBE Guidelines for reporting observational and cross-sectional studies.

The Faculty Readiness to Teach Online (FRTO) instrument [15] was adopted in this study. The FRTO instrument stems from the original theoretical framework which was developed by Martin et al. [15]. and was based on the Health Behavior Change approach [16]. The framework refers to the concept of Readiness as the sum of the interplay of three main drivers: Knowledge, Attitude, and Ability toward online teaching. This instrument is in two parts, each has 32 items that represent competencies in online teaching and are grouped into four dimensions: Course Design, Course Communication, Time Management, and Technical Competence. The items in the two parts are identical, however, the first part asks the participants to rate how important these competencies-related tasks are for online teaching in their opinion (Perception construct), and the second part asks the participants to rate how well they are able to accomplish these competencies-related tasks (ability construct) on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 (I cannot do it at all) to 5 (I can do it well). Completing a 64-item survey, in addition to the demographics questions is likely to disengage the participants, particularly with busy professionals like the Nursing Faculty, which may lead to a potentially poor response rate [17]. Therefore, the decision was made to only utilize the second part of the FRTO instrument in this study, which examines the Nursing Faculty’s perceived level of readiness to accomplish the relevant online tasks (ability). The instrument’s psychometric properties have been previously tested and demonstrated excellent validity and reliability measures. Cronbach’s alpha for the second part (i.e., ability construct) was reported to be 0.92 [15]. Eight sociodemographic factors were also added to the instrument: Age, gender, academic rank, delivery method, a program which the Nursing Faculty are teaching on (BSc, MSc, or PhD), years of teaching and years of teaching online, and country of employment. The instrument was pilot-tested on a sample of 20 Nursing Faculty to ensure the readability and understanding of the instrument.

Table 1 shows the demographic characteristics of the participants in the selected study sample. 152 (46%) participants completed the online survey, 91 (60%) of them were based at universities from Saudi Arabia, and the rest were from the UK (n = 61, 40%). Most of the participants were female (n = 101, 66%), with age range between 30 and 60 years (n = 136, 90%) and mainly teaching BSc nursing students (n = 134, 88.2%). Although the participants had academic teaching experience ranging from 1 to more than 15 years, the majority of them come from middle academic ranks (Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Assistant Professor) with up to 5 years of prior online teaching experience (n = 118, 77.6%). Combined Asynchronous/ Synchronous online or Hybrid/ Blended teaching were the most two commonly used modes of teaching instructions utilized by the participants (n = 51, 33.6%, n = 65, 42.8%) respectively. The participants indicated that Faculty mentoring and Peer support was the most sought source of support when preparing their online teaching sessions (n = 99, 65.1%). Around 38% (n = 57) of the participants confirmed that they had completed a university-mandated online training before they were able or allowed to teach an online course, while the remaining participants either hadn’t or preferred not to say (n = 95, 62%).

Table 2 shows the average mean scores for the reported level of online teaching skills among Nursing Faculty from both the Saudi and British Universities. For the Course Design subscale, Nursing Faculty from Saudi universities reported the highest level of readiness for creating online assignments (M = 4.42, SD = 0.76), whereas Organize instructional materials into modules or units was rated highest by Nursing Faculty from British Universities (M = 4.17, SD = 0.7). For the Course Communication subscale, the skills on email to communicate with the learners had the highest level of readiness by Nursing Faculty from both Saudi and British University (M = 4.6, SD = 0.68 and M = 4.63, SD = 0.67 respectively), although Send announcements / email reminders to course participants item was similarly rated the highest by the Nursing Faculty from the British Universities (M = 4.63, SD = 0.58), compared with those Nursing Faculty from Saudi Arabia Universities (M = 4.50, SD = 0.82). In terms of the Time Management subscale, The Nursing Faculty from Saudi universities rated Schedule weekly hours to facilitate the online course as their most ready-to-do skill (M = 4.27, SD = 0.76 ), whereas Nursing Faculty from British universities indicated they are mostly ready to do both using facilitation strategies to manage time spent on course (e.g., discussion board moderators, collective feedback, grading scales) as well as Spend weekly hours to grade assignments (M = 3.92, SD = 0.91 M = 3.92, SD = 0.91 respectively). Finally, Nursing Faculty from both Saudi and British Universities have indicated that they are readily very competent in completing basic computer operations (e.g., creating and editing documents, managing files and folders) skills (M = 4.35, SD = 0.82 and M = 4.62, SD = 0.49). When examining the Cronbach alpha values for each subscale, the table shows very good to excellent internal consistency, with Cronbach Alpha values ranging from 0.88 to 0.91, and 0.84 for the overall scale.

The differences between the average mean scores for Nursing Faculty’ online teaching skills were examined using selected demographical variables. To decide the most appropriate inferential statistical tests to employ, the assumptions for the parametric vs. non-parametric tests were examined. The independent variables for the four subscales (Course Design, Course Communication, Time Management, and Technical) were tested for normal sample distribution using the Shapiro and Kolmogorov test and all of them showed significant values (p < 0.05), which confirmed that the distributions of the data in these variables were not normal. Visual inspection of the histogram shapes for the above variables also suggested that data representing these variables were not normally distributed, with clustering values clearly evident in the shape of the histogram. Therefore, the non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test was used to examine any significant differences in the average median scores for those binary independent variables (i.e., Gender, country and the academic level which each Nursing Faculty was teaching such as BSc, MSc and PhD individually), and Kruskal-Wallis One-Way Analysis of Variance was used to compare the differences in the average median scores among variables with more than two groups (i.e. All the remaining demographic variables) [20].

Table 3 Shows the differences between average median scores for the study variables and selected demographic variables. The female nursing instructors have scored significantly higher median score on the Course Communication subscale compared with the male nursing Faculty (z=-2.73,p = 0.006). Moreover, the nursing Faculty from Saudi Arabia universities scored significantly higher median score than their counterparts from British universities on both the Course Design subscale (z=-2.6,p = 0.01) and Time Management subscale (z=-4.403,p = 0.001). Those Faculty with six years and above of online teaching experience have generally scored significantly higher median scores in Course Communication (X₂ = 23.4, df = 4, p = 0.00), Time Management (X₂ = 13.2, df = 4,p = 0.01) and Technical (X₂ = 10.13, df = 4,p = 0.008) subscales compared with those with less than six years of online teaching experience. Across both Saudi and British universities, the nursing Faculty who used asynchronous online-only teaching as their primary teaching method had significantly higher median score on the technical subscale compared with those who used other online teaching methods as their primary ones (X₂ = 8.64, df = 3, p = 0.03). Moreover, those nursing Faculty who were required to complete online training before they could teach online courses have significantly higher median scores than those faculty who didn’t on the Course Design (X₂ = 6.15, df = 2, p = 0.05) and Time Management (X₂ = 12, df = 2, p = 0.002) subscales. Interestingly, nursing Faculty across Saudi and British universities who teach on MSc program have scored consistently higher median scores than those who didn’t on all four subscales. There were no significant differences in the median scores among the nursing Faculty across all four subscales based on their age, academic rank, years of teaching experience, and whether they were teaching on the BSc or PhD programs

The aim of this study is to examine the Nursing Faculty’s level of readiness to teach online among a sample of nursing educators from Saudi Arabia and the UK, and to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study which provides insight from those two countries. Undoubtedly, the COVID-19 era was associated with many challenges in nursing education and for the higher education sector in general, but it has equally brought in sizeable opportunities for future online teaching within the academic community.

The findings from this study highlighted the current trend in the adoption of communication styles in the digital teaching approach. In the current study, the Female Nursing Faculty scored higher on the Communication subscale than the Male Nursing Faculty, implying that they employ better communication skills when managing the students via the e-learning platform. This is in line with previous evidence from the literature which confirms that female academic tends to employ a superior communication skill toward students in higher education [21]. But more widely, female care providers tend to exploit opportunities to express communication empathy more frequently when presented with such opportunities than their male counterparts [22]. This reinforces the perception that females in general lean toward employing more positive communication skills when managing individuals and teams, including in academic settings and elsewhere.

The findings suggest that Nursing Faculty across Saudi and British Universities have overall scored high on Course Design and Time Management subscale. Recent studies have confirmed that effective course design has a positive impact on the actual use of the e-learning system in higher educational institutions, including in Saudi Arabian universities [23]. Nursing Faculty from Saudi Arabia universities scored significantly higher on those two subscales compared with their British counterparts. This outlines the substantial level of competency that Nursing Faculty from Saudi universities have arguably achieved in terms of improving their digital skills in course design and managing their time during online teaching effectively, given the fact that most Saudi Universities are considered emerging ones compared with more well-established British universities.

The number of years of teaching online was found to be a key factor when it comes to evaluating the readiness of Nursing Faculty to teach online while having prior training courses in online teaching was influential for the Course Design and Time Management subscales. These findings support earlier published evidence in the literature which generally accepts that the length of Faculty experience in online teaching plays a significant role in the educator’s level of competency in online learning outcomes [24, 25]. In nursing education, prior experience with digital literacy and online teaching was also found to be a strong predictor for providing successful online teaching by Nursing Faculty [26]. On the other hand, the literature shows mixed evidence on the true impact of providing the required e-learning training and instructional support on the level of online teaching competency and quality of online teaching among Nursing Faculty, where some argue for its benefits [27, 28]. Others were more doubtful [26]. Further research is needed to ascertain whether this is context-bound, demographics-related, or applies to overall Nursing Faculty across the board.

The ability to deliver Asynchronous and Synchronous teaching remains a critical skill for Nursing Faculty and the wider academic community. Collectively, both help the Nursing Faculty to address and manage challenges related to the course materials and class access. Online teaching is predominantly delivered using asynchronous methods [29]. Nursing Faculty and students alike are bound to develop more technical competency in asynchronous online teaching as it is more frequently used as a teaching method, although previous evidence suggests that this may not necessarily have an impact on the students’ academic performance and that pre-licensure nursing students can – for example- learn essential didactic contents using synchronized and asynchronized online teaching [30, 31]. Unlike undergraduate nursing education which is said to focus heavily on the theoretical part of learning, the postgraduate study offers a more self-directed learning style. Thus, the Nursing Faculty may be better prepared to engage in a postgraduate student learning experience with its flexible attributes and consequently develop better competency in the long term [32]. Yeung et al. 2023). Postgraduate nursing students were also found to be better prepared for the Pedagogical Shift from face-to-face to online [33], though more research is needed to examine if this is more unique to the master or the more research-intensive PhD programs.

The Nursing Faculty was selected using a convenient sampling approach, which limits the generalisability to other settings. Also, the study relied on the Faculty’s self-assessment of their readiness to teach online, which may have elements of subjectivity with the subsequent implications on the actual level of readiness. The study, however, offered an important insight into a contemporary educational issue that is likely to contribute to future debate on embedding online teaching in nursing education.

The study has important implications for practice. The number of years of experience in teaching online emerged as a critical factor for determining the level of readiness to teach online; academic institutions must therefore start to draw plans to invest in training the Nursing Faculty in online teaching, via both structured training or unstructured, informal one which help to build a critical mass of Nursing Faculty who are competent in teaching online. Parallel investment in the e-learning infrastructure is also imperative to make such levels of readiness more sustainable.The COVID-19 era has renewed the interest in online teaching in nursing education. Moreover, this international perspective on the Nursing Faculty’s level of readiness to teach online provides impetus toward benchmarking the skills and competencies that nursing faculty should strive to acquire, either via formal or informal training, to ensure the delivery of effective online nursing education. It is crucial that Nursing Faculty, students, and other stakeholders, are consulted when defining what skills and competencies are required for future, post-COVID-19 online nursing education.

This research explored the level of readiness to teach online among a selected sample of Nursing Faculty from two countries: Saudi Arabia and the UK. Whilst Nursing Faculty have overall expressed a high level of skills and readiness to teach online, there were some significant differences based on gender, countries where they are based, and the use of Asynchronous vs. synchronous online teaching. Future research needs to consider the empirical testing of those factors in post the COVID-19 era, and their actual impact on the students’ learning experience. Policymakers and nursing academic educational leaders should consider those factors when planning future formal and informal training to improve the Nursing Faculty’s readiness to teach online. Previous years of experience in online teaching emerged as a strong factor in shaping the nursing faculty’s level of readiness to teach online. Any prospective initiative to uplift the skills of online teaching among Nursing Faculty may include a peer learning system where those Nursing Faculty with significant years of online teaching can mentor and support less experienced peers.