Abstract:
Telecommuting in education field, enforced by Romanian Government measures as policy
responses to COVID-19 pandemic, has had a tremendous effect both on teaching professionals and
on students. This paper investigates the first group, namely the teachers and their perception of
online education versus students’ academic performance during distance learning, with a particular
focus on the negative factors impacting educational activities: objective ones, such as the limits of
technology, and personal subjective ones, as in the phenomenon of negative affect. The study is based
on quantitative research that assesses the relationship between personal subjective factors (skills,
affect, difficulties in adapting, level of preparedness, professional satisfaction) and technological
objective factors (inadequate electronic devices, faulty internet services), with a view to establishing if
online education is genuinely sustainable as a valid educational system in the long run. 881 teachers
from Romania were subjected to reflect on the effectiveness of online education during the pandemic,
resulting in a correlational study with some interesting conclusions and directions highlighted as
characteristic for a sustainable educational program. All in all, it can be concluded that when teachers
become experienced in online teaching, the efficiency of online teaching is set to improve and when
improvement happens, online teaching becomes sustainable as a proper method of training via
online-facilitated means of communication.
