The COVID-19 pandemic required educators and learners to shift to emergency remote instruction with little time for preparation. To understand how teachers managed the transition, we surveyed nearly 1,500 teachers from 118 countries from April to September 2020. Using cluster analysis, we detect two readily distinguishable groups of instructors: a group who was more engaged with remote instruction and had better coping in terms of online teaching challenges, and a group who had lower levels of both engagement and coping. We compare the two groups in terms of their sociodemographic characteristics, and also assess the relationship between each sociodemographic marker and teachers’ engagement and coping. Overall, our results suggest that teachers were most engaged and coped best with the transition when they had prior experience with remote instruction, taught in the higher education sector, and taught using real-time synchronous modalities. We also find non-trivial results regarding teachers’ gender, years of teaching experience, and their country’s level of economic development, and observe no relationship between teachers’ age and engagement or coping. The detection of the contextual effects underscores the importance of large multisite research.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has upended lives and thrown the taken for granted into disarray. One of the most affected groups were teachers and students, faced with the necessity of school closures and—where logistically feasible—an urgent shift to emergency remote instruction, often with little prior notice. In this contribution, based on an online survey involving participants from 91 countries, we offer a perspective bridging the two groups, by investigating the role of teachers' demographics and professional adaptation to emergency remote teaching in their perception of how their students were coping with the novel situation. The resultant model explains 51% of variance, and highlights the relative weights of the predictor variables. Given the importance of teacher perceptions in the effectiveness of their instruction, the findings may offer valuable guidelines for future training and intervention programs.

In response to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutions around the world were forced into lockdown in order to contain the spread of the virus. To ensure continuous provision of education, most transitioned to emergency remote instruction. This has been particularly the case in higher education (HE) institutions. The circumstances of the pandemic have brought unprecedented psychological pressure on the population, in the case of educators and students exacerbated by the transition to a mode of instruction that was completely novel to the majority. The present study examines how college and university instructors dealt with teaching online in these unparalleled circumstances, with a focus on how factors connected with their daily lives and livelihoods influenced their well-being. Between April and September 2020, a comprehensive online survey was filled out by 804 HE instructors from 92 countries. We explore how sociodemographic variables such as gender, age, relationship status, living conditions, and length of professional experience non-trivially affect situational anxiety, work-life synergy, coping, and productivity. The results contribute to a better understanding of the impact of the pandemic and emergency remote instruction on college and university instructors’ well-being by explaining the mechanisms mediating the relationship between individual, contextual, and affective variables. It may provide helpful guidelines for college and university administrators as well as teachers themselves as to how help alleviate the adverse effects of the continuing pandemic and possible similar disruptions leading to school closures on coping and well-being.

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