Teaching Changes When You Stop Treating It Like a Format and Start Treating It Like a Practice

The real question is not online or in person

What if the biggest mistake in higher education is treating teaching mode as the main decision, when the real issue is something deeper: how faculty learn to teach at all?

That question sits underneath the familiar debate about online, blended, and face to face instruction. It is easy to make the conversation about preference, and the preference data are revealing: many instructors still favor face to face environments, while a smaller group embraces fully online teaching. But preferences do not tell the whole story. They often reflect habit, comfort, institutional incentives, and the amount of support people have received, not simply what is educationally best.

This is where the more interesting insight emerges. The shift to online and blended teaching is not just a change in delivery. It is a test of whether institutions can build a culture of teaching development that helps instructors become more capable over time. In other words, the real challenge is not adopting a new format. It is creating the conditions for pedagogical growth.

The future of teaching will not be decided by which mode wins. It will be decided by whether faculty can keep learning after the mode changes.

Why faculty prefer the classroom, but keep reaching for the digital tool

At first glance, faculty preferences look contradictory. Many instructors want to be in the room with students, to see faces, read energy, improvise in real time, and sense when confusion appears. That instinct makes sense. Teaching is not simply content delivery. It is a human performance, a relational practice, and a form of responsiveness that is easier to feel when everyone shares the same space.

Yet the same instructors often want digital tools for the chores around teaching: posting syllabi, distributing materials, collecting assignments, handling routine communication. This is not hypocrisy. It is a clue. Faculty are separating the parts of teaching that require presence from the parts that require administration. They are implicitly saying: keep the human core, automate the friction.

That distinction matters because it suggests that resistance to online teaching is not always resistance to technology itself. Often it is resistance to the fear that technology will flatten the most meaningful parts of teaching into a series of clicks. In response, the strongest blended model is not one that simply adds online components. It is one that protects what should remain human while using digital systems to remove unnecessary drag.

Think of it like a rehearsal process in theater. You would not use the stage manager to replace the actors. But you absolutely would use the stage manager to coordinate cues, distribute scripts, and make the production run smoothly. Good technology in teaching should work the same way: invisible when possible, enabling when necessary, and never allowed to steal the performance.

The hidden variable is not format, it is familiarity

One of the most important patterns in faculty experience is that comfort with online teaching grows with use. The more instructors teach online, the more likely they are to prefer blended or fully online environments. This is not a trivial finding. It reveals that preference is partly a function of exposure, confidence, and accumulated skill.

That should change how institutions think about adoption. Too often, they assume teaching preferences are fixed, as if faculty fall into stable camps: traditionalists who will never adapt, innovators who will always experiment, and everyone else somewhere in between. But the evidence points to a more fluid reality. People often resist what they have not been supported to practice.

This is true in almost every craft. A novice woodworker may dislike a table saw because it feels dangerous and clumsy. A seasoned woodworker sees precision, speed, and possibility. The machine did not change. The relationship to the machine changed. Teaching technology works the same way. When faculty are given time, mentoring, and repeated opportunities to experiment, the tool begins to feel less like an obligation and more like an extension of their judgment.

This has a major implication for online faculty development, especially for programs designed during moments of disruption such as the pandemic. The question is not only whether a training program helped people survive the immediate transition. The deeper question is whether it changed their long term practice. What still remains a year later? What habits endure? What experiments became routines? What parts of their teaching identity were permanently altered?

That is where the scholarship of teaching and learning becomes essential. It gives us a way to ask not simply, “Did this workshop work?” but “What kind of teacher did this workshop help create?”

The institution’s real job: build a learning community for teachers

If online and blended teaching are here to stay, then institutions cannot treat faculty development as a one time service event. A webinar is not a culture. A tip sheet is not a system. A mandatory training module is not professional growth.

What faculty need is a sustainable learning ecology. That means a structure in which instructors can keep learning, compare notes, test ideas, fail safely, and improve iteratively. It also means recognizing that expertise is uneven. A junior instructor new to digital pedagogy does not need the same support as a tenured professor who wants to redesign a seminar for a hybrid setting. One size fits none.

The most effective faculty development programs share a few characteristics:

1. They are ongoing, not episodic.
2. They include expert mentoring and peer mentoring.
3. They respect different starting points and levels of confidence.
4. They treat experimentation as normal, not embarrassing.
5. They assess impact, not just attendance.

That last point is crucial. Institutions often celebrate participation in professional development without asking what changed afterward. But if the goal is better teaching, the real measure is whether instructors alter practice, refine design, or become more reflective about student learning. Otherwise, development becomes theater for compliance.

There is also a subtler institutional issue hiding in the background: promotion and evaluation. If universities increase online offerings while still rewarding only older forms of classroom performance, they create a mismatch. Faculty are being asked to do one kind of work while being judged by another. That is a recipe for cynicism.

A serious teaching culture must align evaluation with actual labor. If institutions want faculty to build effective online and blended experiences, then the systems that recognize excellence must value that work as real scholarship, real craft, and real contribution.

What 20 years of teaching inquiry really teaches us

The deeper thread connecting teaching preferences and long term faculty development is the question that has always animated the scholarship of teaching and learning: what works, for whom, under what conditions, and for how long?

That question matters because teaching is often treated as if it were either pure intuition or pure technique. It is neither. Teaching is a practice that becomes stronger when it is observed, named, tested, and revised. The best teaching communities do not just share content. They create a collective habit of inquiry.

That is why a field devoted to teaching and learning is so important. It resists the temptation to treat classroom innovation as a passing trend. Instead, it asks us to examine enduring effects. Which practices survive the moment of enthusiasm? Which ones collapse when the workshop ends? Which changes become part of an instructor’s ordinary repertoire?

This long view matters especially for online faculty development. Many programs are judged by immediate satisfaction, but the real test is retention of practice. A faculty member may leave a training session inspired, yet inspiration fades. What remains after a year is usually more honest: a redesigned assignment, a new discussion method, a more disciplined use of the learning management system, a better rhythm for feedback, a willingness to try peer review, or a stronger sense of what students actually need.

These are not small outcomes. They are the building blocks of durable teaching change. A program succeeds not when it creates excitement, but when it changes the default behavior of a classroom.

The highest form of faculty development is not motivation. It is the creation of habits that survive motivation.

A new model: teaching as an evolving interface between humans and systems

The most useful way to think about this moment may be to stop imagining teaching modes as competing identities and start seeing them as an interface problem.

Every course is an interface between human beings and institutional systems. Students need access, clarity, feedback, and connection. Faculty need tools, time, support, and autonomy. The medium of instruction determines how those needs are balanced. Face to face teaching is often strong at immediacy and relationship. Online teaching is often strong at structure, flexibility, and scale. Blended teaching can combine both, but only if it is designed intentionally rather than assembled by accident.

From this perspective, the goal is not to declare one format superior. It is to build a teaching environment that matches the pedagogical task. A discussion based seminar may need high levels of live interaction. A course with heavy logistical complexity may benefit from digital scaffolding. A large enrollment course may need a blended architecture to preserve both responsiveness and manageability. The question is not what is most modern. The question is what best serves learning while respecting faculty labor.

This reframing also explains why older faculty may sometimes gravitate toward online teaching. Experience can make experimentation less threatening. Tenure can reduce the fear of evaluation. Time can make it easier to learn a new system. In this sense, the issue is not age alone. It is the combination of expertise, freedom, and willingness to redesign one’s practice.

That is a lesson institutions should take seriously. If they want more instructors to embrace blended and online environments, they should not simply demand adaptation. They should reduce risk, create peer support, and make innovation legible and rewarded.

Key Takeaways

• Stop framing teaching as a binary choice between online and face to face. The more useful question is how to preserve human connection while removing unnecessary administrative friction.
• Treat faculty preference as dynamic, not fixed. Comfort with online teaching grows through experience, mentoring, and repeated practice.
• Build faculty development as an ongoing community, not a one off event. Sustainable change requires peer support, expert guidance, and room for experimentation.
• Measure impact over time. The real test of a professional development program is whether it changes teaching behavior months later.
• Align evaluation with the work institutions actually want. If online and blended teaching are part of enrollment strategy, promotion and recognition systems must reflect that reality.

The deeper lesson: teaching is not a mode, it is an ecology

The most important insight here is that teaching quality does not live inside a platform, a classroom, or a single method. It lives in the ecology around practice: the support faculty receive, the incentives they face, the time they are given, the norms that define excellence, and the opportunities they have to learn from one another.

That is why the question of online versus face to face is ultimately too small. Formats matter, but they are only containers. What fills them is a culture of inquiry, trust, and ongoing refinement. A university that understands this will not ask faculty to simply move courses online. It will ask something more ambitious: how do we create the conditions in which teachers keep becoming better teachers?

And once you ask that question, the debate changes. The issue is no longer whether online teaching can imitate the classroom. The issue is whether institutions can design a system where good teaching, in any medium, becomes more learnable, more shareable, and more enduring over time.