In this paper we examine the impacts of the global pandemic in 2020 on different levels of education system, particularly looking at the changes in teaching practice. The health emergency caused closure of schools, and online distance education became a temporary solution, creating discomfort for many teachers for whom this was the first time engaged with online education. In our research we investigated two important dimensions, namely, how technology was used and what the newfound distance meant in terms of the teacher-student relationship. The article offers insights into experiences of teaching from lockdown reported by 41 teachers at primary, vocational and higher education level in the region of Vaud, Switzerland. This comparative qualitative research has provided an opportunity for an in-depth analysis of the main similarities and differences at three distinctly different educational levels and a possibility to learn more about common coping practices in teaching. The study gives a contribution to a lack of comparative studies of teacher experiences at different educational levels. Results show two dimensions in handling the lockdown crisis: mastering the digital tools and the importance of student–teacher interaction. Whilst the interviewed teachers largely overcame the challenges of mastering digital tools, optimizing the quality interaction and ensuring the transactional presence online remained a problem. This indicates the importance of the social aspect in education at all levels, and implies that teacher support needs to expand beyond technical pedagogical knowledge of online distance education.

Sustaining changes in teachers’ practices is a challenge that determines the success of curricular reforms, from which Digital Education (DE) is not exempt. As the literature on sustainability is considered “scarce” and “scattered”, long-term studies modelling the factors impacting teachers’ sustained uptake of DE pedagogical content are lacking. Thus, we investigate whether and how 287 in-service teachers sustained a primary school DE curricular reform over a year after they completed their two-year DE professional development program. We model the sustainability of the reform through Structural Equation Modelling, and identify critical sustainability-factors. The validated Sustainable Adoption of Digital Education (SADE) model confirms that sustainability in the fourth year of the reform depends on perceived usefulness of teaching the new content, ease of implementation, and access to sufficient support in schools. Such factors should thus be evaluated, accounted for in the implementation phase of the reform, and sustained over time. The findings confirm that the DE curricular reform model contributes to positive self-efficacy to teach DE, provides sufficient in-school support, and promotes increasing adoption over time. However, as teachers’ practices have not yet stabilised, and teachers may still adopt more to cover the breadth of DE-concepts, it is important to remain attentive to remaining sustainability barriers: lack of time, effort required to teach DE with teachers preferring to delegate, and lack of student-learning evidence, the latter being a significant challenge to address in the literature. These barriers must therefore be jointly addressed by researchers and practitioners in the field in order to promote the sustainability of the reform.

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