Petrila, LaurentiuGoudenhooft, GabrielaGyarmati, Beata FatimePopescu, Felix-AngelSimut, Corneliu CristianBrihan, Alina-Carmen2023-03-022023-03-022022-06-14Petrila, L.; Goudenhooft, G.; Gyarmati, B.F.; Popescu, F.-A.; Simut, , C.; Brihan, A.-C. Effective Teaching during the COVID-19 Pandemic? Distance Learning and Sustainable Communication in Romania. Sustainability 2022, 14, 7269. https://DOI.org/10.3390/su14127269.2071-1050 (online)10.3390/su14127269https://repository.up.ac.za/handle/2263/89940Telecommuting 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.en© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.Online educationDistance learningEducational servicesDigital competenciesEffectiveness of online educationArticle