Real estate teaching and research in times of COVID-19 - The faculty's view

The Covid-19 pandemic has seriously disrupted our way of teaching and of doing research in institutions of higher education. For over two years, many of us had to teach remotely or in a hybrid fashion, had to organize and manage exams over the Internet, and supervise student research through video conferences. Similar problems arose with the usual research activities. Since travel was restricted, many conferences and workshops were either cancelled or moved to electronic media. While distance friction became less important for cooperation in established contacts, informal exchange and meeting new colleagues at events largely vanished.The pandemic led to a flood of Covid-19 related research with many articles published on – often newly established – preprint servers. University administrators, policy makers, and the public press are speculating about the long-term implications the pandemic will have on universities and the higher education industry.These two years have led to an accumulation of anecdotal evidence, speculation, and a few hypotheses about the future development in higher education. Some argue that the sector will quickly return to the pre-pandemic mode once the pandemic is over. Others predict higher education will be torn apart by the fundamental disruptions caused by the pandemic. Relatively little, however, is known about the experiences and the expectations of the main actors in higher education, the faculty members. In our paper, we will present the results of a systematic questionnaire survey of faculty members in Europe about their academic experience during the pandemic and about their expectations for the near future. The purpose of the paper is to identify patterns of reactive and proactive behaviour of lecturers and researchers and to investigate differences in their perceptions.Since it became obvious over the past years that disciplines were affected and also reacted very differently, it is important to investigate academic disciplines separately and to compare across disciplines. Our investigation will focus on regional science and on real estate economics. These disciplines are thematically quite close, but differ in the types of students they attract and in the segment of society that is interested in their research results and alumni. In our paper, we will show differences between these disciplines as well as differences by country or region, by gender, by academic status, by age, etc. Our survey deals in a systematic way with the experiences during the pandemic as well as with the expectations about the near future in terms of teaching and research management.