Effective Emergency Online Teaching

Abstract: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, educators had to conduct emergency online teaching from home. This rapid switch required a lot of individual learning for teachers, even those who had conducted planned online teaching before the health crisis, impacting their effectiveness. As teachers adapted to their digital teaching environments, they faced technical challenges with teaching tools and increasing cybersecurity concerns, while they no longer had access to onsite IT support. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis was to study the measures contributing to the effectiveness of online teaching propelled by the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores the experiences of five Informatics teachers working at five different universities across Sweden, from the early stages of the COVID-19 up until 2022. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted in order to gain insight into how the educators dealt with the aforementioned challenges. Partly in line with existing research, the findings indicate that readiness is the essential measure influencing the effectiveness of emergency online teaching, while it can be decomposed into the following sub-measures: (i) prior experience, (ii) technological infrastructure, (iii) online culture, (iv) combination of different teaching techniques and (v) protection against intrusion.