Maintaining Service Quality in Remote Teaching Environment: Case of Lebanese International University

Purpose: The shift from traditional face-to-face classes to virtual classrooms in response to Covid 19 pandemic has affected the higher education sector worldwide, including Lebanon. Among all private universities in Lebanon, the Lebanese International University (LIU) is the largest in terms of enrolment, which enroll 30% of higher education students in the country. Therefore, this study evaluates the LIU experience in remote teaching. After completing three consecutive online semesters, it was essential to measure to which extent did the remote instructor performance affected the educational service quality at LIU. Methodology: By the end of the Fall 2021 semester, a cross-sectional online survey was conducted among students at the School of Business and a total of 450 usable responses pertaining to undergraduate students were considered for data analysis. Findings: Using SPSS Software, the validity and reliability of the questionnaire has been verified and results showed that remote instructors’ performance has a significant and strong positive correlation with all dimensions of service quality; highest for reliability and lowest for tangible. Moreover, regression analysis results showed that 81.5 % of the variance in service quality scores can be predicted from the remote instructors’ performance. Suggestions: Future studies could collect data in a longitudinal manner and include a more representative student sample of the university students.