Lecturers’ technostress at a South African university in the context of coronavirus (COVID-19)

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced all universities to move fully online and adopt more technological resources for effective online learning (e-learning). Lecturers have become frustrated, anxious and rebellious because they are bombarded with different technological demands and contexts, ranging from learning management systems to social media sites, video communication technologies and others. Availability of various technological resources is the only solution to enhance e-learning during the COVID-19 lockdown period, but it can sometimes lead to throughput losses due to technostress. To bridge this gap, the current qualitative case study utilises the person-environment fit framework of stress to explore lecturers’ technostress during e-learning during the COVID-19 shutdown/lockdown. E-reflective journals and Zoom one-on-one semi-structured interviews were used to generate data from 13 lecturers who were conveniently and purposively selected because they were accessible and used various technological resources to offer online lectures during the COVID-19 shutdown/lockdown. Findings showed that information, communication, and technology features mainly caused technostress to lecturers, and they were unable to deal with it because of pressure to meet due dates stipulated by university management. This study concludes by recommending lecturers to teach from the inner-self/self-identity in dealing with levels of technostress (institutional, social and technological resources) and for universities to provide possible control measures to deal with lecturers’ technostress.