Thus, the bivariate Pearson correlations’ results of the entire sample are summarized in Table 40. It shows that the dimensions of ICT use, similar to the case of the learners’ study, show several statistically significant correlations, thus ICT use of instructors could also be seen as complex issue with several intertwined reasons. The highest correlations observed were between:

Neither of the scales proved to have been rated significantly differently by males and females in the sample; however, some scales showed significant differences regarding teaching experience, as shown in Table 42. Wherever Levene’s test for equality of variance rejects the null hypothesis (i.e., it is significant at p < 0.05), the t-test values of the Equal variances not assumed (i.e., Welch’s t-test) are taken into consideration throughout the interpretation of the test results.

The observed mean rank values (see Table 42) and significance levels confirm that Hungarian university instructors in the sample with one to 20 years of teaching experience attached higher importance to ICT devices, showed a higher willingness to use technology, invest more time in development, perceive that they have developmental opportunities, use technology as part of their instructional practices as well as perceived to have better content creating and search engine use skills and they keep up with recent developments more often. The statistically significant lower mean values for Offline versus online self-image also confirm that less experienced teachers were more self-confident in the online sphere, and teachers with 20+ years of experience were more likely to feel less comfortable as instructors online.

While these findings echo the literature (Becker, 1999; Drent & Meelissen, 2008; Kler, 2014), the exact dimensions in which there are significant differences between less and more experienced instructors contribute towards a more detailed understanding of their ICT literacy. The mean differences of Opportunities of ICT skills development and Digital competences 2: Keeping up with development might signal that for instructors with less teaching experience, technology itself could be the source of development, while more experienced teachers could be expected to seek help from colleagues or through other channels. More experienced teachers’ lower acceptance scores also point towards weaker beliefs concerning the importance of technology, nevertheless the entire sample’s mean acceptance value was rather high (M = 4.30; SD = 0.58). Lower acceptance is linked to weaker beliefs (Drent & Meelissen, 2008; Kler, 2014), and strong positive beliefs are linked to more likely integration (Lowther et al., 2008; Sang et al., 2010); thus, development and experimentation possibilities should be facilitated for more experienced teachers, and the source of such possibilities could be younger colleagues because learning educational technology is best linked to one’s specific area of expertise (Koehler et al., 2014; Mishra & Koehler, 2006).

 

To confirm if the spring and autumn 2020 Covid-19-triggered distant education periods (the first of which was an emergency remote teaching, and the second a planned hybrid or digital teaching period), respondents of the questionnaire were asked to rate their 1) technological knowledge, 2) how much the perceived that technology-mediated education proved to be a burden for them, and 3) how much of their classes were implemented either synchronously or asynchronously online in the first and second Covid-waves. In the first two pairs of cases, the questionnaire operated with 5-point Likert-scales, while a percentile value had to be entered by the respondents regarding their implemented classes. To find out if the differences were significant, paired sample t-tests were run on the three pairs of scales, the result of which is detailed in Table 44.

 

Some collected background variables also targeted participants’ experiences with online education. It was found that the most frequently used learning management system (LMS) was Microsoft Teams (54.9% of the participants used it), followed by Moodle (39.4%), Google Classroom (28.2%), Neptun Meet Street (16.9%) and Edmodo (7.0%). Only 13 informants (18.3%) reported that some form of digital training was directly part of their university education, and 90% of the informants claimed that the source of their technological pedagogical knowledge was self-development, while 81.7% of the informants reported that they have participated in collegial workshops and interdepartmental training programmes. Additionally, 33% of the informants participated in official workshops and the same percentile of instructors claimed to have used online networking sites or pages as sources for development. In a Hungarian study conducted in the K12 educational context, approximately 66% of teachers reported that they had resorted to groups of professional communities during online education, and 22.7% of the informants had educational technological training as part of their university studies (Fekete, 2020a). This points towards the necessity of enriching teacher education and training programmes with subject-specific ICT methodological courses (Fekete, 2020a); Dringó-Horváth & Dombi, 2020; M. Pintér, 2019; MDOS, 2016; Molnár et al., 2020; Öveges & Csizér, 2018).

It can be concluded that, in a sense, the emergency remote teaching and the hybrid educational experiences in many cases contributed successfully towards providing the environmental and experimental opportunities for instructors to develop their technological as well as techno-pedagogical knowledge domains and that is why they reported gains in their ICT knowledge and expressed that online instruction in the second Covid-wave was less of a burden, which resulted in more implemented university classes among the instructors in the sample.