The COVID-19 pandemic brought about profound changes in social and professional contexts. Schools and universities all over the world were closed to curb the contamination. In a short period, many educators were forced to reinvent their classes in a non-classroom mode, mediated by technology. This scenario of overwork can lead educators to stress, favoring distress, anxiety, and depression due to the uncertainties resulting from the pandemic and the search for new knowledge acquisition. This paper shows the research results conducted by university educators in Latin America who have been exercising teaching activities during social isolation imposed by COVID-19. The results show that with just one exception, educators from all countries reported suffering from some stress-related aspects concerning some manner to remote teaching. Higher workload perception came from women, unfolding gender inequalities amplified during pandemics. There is no clear relationship between the degree of technological expertise and stress factors, although, in general, educators use more time to prepare learning material and monitor students’ progress. Technological infrastructure was not a big concern for those educators in big cities, but some fundamental infrastructure problems were reported due to each country’s economic reality or geographic conditions.
This study addresses the topic of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education, in Uruguay, from the perspective of three experts from teacher education and training centers, University of the Republic and Plan Ceibal. This investigation is part of a research agenda of the Smart Ecosystems for Learning and Inclusion (SELI) project (ERANet17/ICT-0076 SELI. http://project-seli.herokuapp.com/). Respondents were selected based on the following sampling criteria: they hold positions in the Uruguayan educational system, in educational management, program implementation, teacher education and/or research.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.