Teachers' Readiness for Remote Teaching During COVID-19 Pandemic: The Case of Latvia

The state of emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic influenced educational processes in schools all over the world. Teachers had a very short time to reform all their work and started to use new technologies, which increased their workload and level of stress. Information on factors affecting teachers' readiness for remote teaching is insufficient, and we aimed to investigate it in this study. We performed a population-based cross-sectional study after the first experience of teachers working remotely during the Spring 2020 state of emergency in Latvia. We assessed the self-reported "overall readiness for remote teaching" using five sub-domains of a specific survey. We observed a reversed association between the teachers' "overall readiness for remote teaching" and teaching the subject of sports (beta = -7.25, CI - 10.97; -3.54) and a significant association with the self-assessment of teachers' own digital skills (beta = 6.54, CI 5.25; 7.83). We conclude that special training programs for teachers on the efficacy of remote teaching should be created to help them get over the difficulties of new educational processes and improve their digital skills. We recommend additional support for sports and health teachers as their readiness for remote teaching was significantly lower.