From Emergency Remote Teaching to Hybrid Models: Faculty Perceptions Across Three Spanish Universities

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The text presented offers a well-documented study on the assessment of teachers from three Spanish universities regarding the implementation of educational solutions during the COVID-19 emergency. This particular period has been analysed numerous times through various documents and articles, which the authors generously document, allowing for the adequate structuring of a global overview.
The text stands out for the originality of its approach, particularly because it allows the tools generated during this time of emergency to be projected onto the present day.
The bibliography is well referenced, providing DOIs where appropriate.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The only suggestion is to check some colloquialisms, which confuse the reader due to the rhythm these expressions acquire in the language presented (e.g. lines 28 and 32)

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for the positive feedback and the note on colloquialisms. We revised the manuscript to raise the register and remove colloquial turns of phrase that could disrupt reading. Specifically, we replaced expressions such as “race-against-the-clock transition” with “rapid transition under time constraints” and “carry teaching forward” with “sustain instruction”, and we adjusted similar instances in the Abstract and Introduction. We believe these edits address the reviewer’s concern.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This manuscript presents an interesting and deep study of the experiences with Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) across Spanish universities. The paper is built upon a solid foundation, and I commend the authors for their work on this important topic. The study's clear strengths lie in its rich and relevant literature review, a well-considered methodological design, and the clear, structured presentation of the results. The suggestions that follow are intended to help strengthen the manuscript’s structure, transparency, and overall contribution:
The literature review should be restructured to more directly relate to each research question and to clearly identify the research gaps the study addresses. As the results section is already organised along the themes indentified as objectives, this alignment would create a much stronger and more coherent narrative thread. Therefore I also suggest to use the clear structure and logic of the objectives and reframe them to be the guiding research questions for the paper. 
The methods section requires more detail on the data analysis process for the sake of methodological rigour and replicability. Please provide more information on the coding process and its methodology (e.g., was it inductive, deductive, or a hybrid approach?). It is also important to state the number of coders involved and whether inter-rater reliability was assessed. Finally, please specify if any software was used for the analysis. For transparency, the interview protocol could be included as a supplement, or at the very least, examples of key interview questions should be provided within the methods section.
I was missing more background information on the specific context of Spanish higher education during the transition to ERT. What was the general level of digitalisation before the pandemic? What, if any, national or institutional policies and guidelines were provided to support the shift? It would be very important to state when the interviews were conducted, as the timing relative to the initial crisis period is a critical contextual factor.
To enhance the analysis, it would be beneficial to better represent the results of the coding process, perhaps by showing the codes themselves and discussing their distribution. I would suggest creating a summary of the results, perhaps in a table format, that displays the codes (or summaries of similarities and discrepancies) for the core themes in parallel across the institutions.
The discussion and conclusion sections should emphasize "lessons learned" from the ERT experience. The manuscript would have greater impact if it more explicitly discussed how the positive experiences and adaptations from ERT could be integrated and sustained in "normal" post-pandemic academic work.
Additional minor point: Table 1 is missing a caption. Additionally, its formatting could be improved to more clearly distinguish between the categories of gender and disciplinarity.

Author Response

Thank you for your constructive suggestions. We have (i) restructured the literature review to align explicitly with the four research questions and to state the addressed gaps; (ii) expanded the Methods to detail the analytic procedure: a reflexive thematic analysis with a hybrid deductive–inductive codebook derived from the study aims and interview guide; two coders per university independently coded a shared subset, met to reconcile discrepancies, refined the codebook, and then coded the full dataset using ATLAS.ti (version 24), with cross-site calibration meetings. Consistent with reflexive TA, reliability was ensured through negotiated consensus rather than a coefficient. We now specify the number of coders (six in total; two per site) and the interview dates, and we add background on the Spanish higher education context during the ERT transition (LMS adoption and national/institutional guidance). For transparency, the full semi-structured interview protocol is provided as Appendix A (Supplement S1). To better represent the coding results, we include Table II, which summarizes codes/themes and highlights similarities and differences across ULL, UEx, and UVa. Finally, we strengthened the Discussion/Conclusions to make the “lessons learned” and avenues for post-pandemic integration more explicit.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf