Exploring Teachers' Requirements for Educational Rexources: Diverse User Types and Common Needs

In its quest for instructionally sound implementations of learning platforms, the educational sector is facing several challenges, catalysed by the Covid-19 pandemic. As the sector grappled with the sudden shift from traditional instruction to online teaching during the pandemic, the pivotal role of high-quality educational content and educators' readiness for virtual learning became evident.
In response, this research delves into the multifaceted requirements of educational content from diverse perspectives, focusing on teachers with varying online learning familiarity and engagement. In particular, the study addresses educational content utilization and creation of diverse users, probing two central questions:
1) How has teachers' usage intensity changed due to the pandemic and how does this translate into different user types?
2) What are the distinctive needs of these different user types when it comes to creating and adopting educational content?
Surveying 2,026 teachers across two large-scale online learning platforms, this study identifies assorted user types (i.e., Monthly Users, Weekly Users, Daily Users, and Converted Users) based on their utilization patterns. Notably, the pandemic's impact on usage frequency varied among the different user types, significantly altering behaviour for Converted Users. This adds a new aspect to the under-researched area of teacher user types.
Moreover, the research examines educators' resource creation engagement, revealing universal involvement regardless of the type of user. This underscores the need for educational content to meet defined criteria, irrespective of their utilization or creation context. These criteria centre on Teaching Productivity Improvement, Collaboration and Common Usage, and Affirmation and Recognition, with their significance linked to the different types of users and different content-related activities (i.e., creation or use).
Monthly Users have relatively modest requirements, while Daily Users pose the most demanding needs. The importance of Collaboration and Common Usage intensifies during utilization, surpassing Teaching Productivity Enhancement, in contrast to creation. Affirmation and Recognition remain consistent across user types and content-related activities.
In summary, we shed light on the interplay between user types and educational content requirements, guiding content provision to meet the diverse needs of educators. The findings emphasise the necessity for learning platforms and content providers to accommodate diverse user types and tailor their offerings accordingly. Additionally, collaborative features in learning platforms emerge as pivotal in enhancing teaching productivity and fostering educator communities. In essence, this study offers invaluable insights into the diverse landscape of educational content requirements, paving the way for tailored support in the domain of online learning.