Lecturers’ self-efficacy in online teaching is key to their students’ motivation and achievements and to lecturers’ teaching experience (Corry & Stella, 2018). During the first COVID-19 lockdown, teaching at European universities was delivered online, meaning that any in-person contact between lecturers and their students was abruptly removed. As connectedness with students has been identified as an important factor in learning environments (Klassen et al., 2012), this study explored how connectedness with students predicts lecturers’ self-efficacy in this new online teaching environment over and above other variables of the social context (connectedness with colleagues and perceived support from the university) and previous experience with digital learning tools. This study provides insights from the UK, where ninety-two lecturers from a post-92 university completed an online survey about their teaching experience before and during the COVID-19-related lockdown. Participants were from all age groups and genders and taught a wide range of subjects (e.g., Business, Social Sciences, Humanities, STEM, Arts, Computer Science). To assess self-efficacy for online teaching and connectedness with students and colleagues, we modified items from existing scales (Gosselin, 2009 & Prieto, 2006; Klassen et al., 2012; Cronbach’s alphas: .75-.88). We further assessed to what extent lecturers felt that their university was backing them up, and we measured previous experience with using digital tools in teaching: (1) usage before the lockdown, (2) enrichment of conventional teaching, (3) whether participants considered themselves a ‘digital native’ native’ (familiarity with the digital world) or ‘digital immigrant’ (need of adjustment to the digital world). In multiple linear regressions, we predicted lecturers’ self-efficacy for online teaching (1) from the three connectedness variables (connectedness with students, connectedness with colleagues, and perceived support from the university), and (2) from lecturers’ previous experience with online teaching. In the first model, connectedness with students emerged as the strongest predictor (positive and significant). In the second model, the perception that digital tools had enriched lecturers’ conventional teaching pre-lockdown was the only significant predictor (positive). Combining these strongest predictors into one model, both remained significant, but the latter was stronger. In open-text answers, lecturers identified connecting and communicating well with their students as a key factor for the success of online teaching. This piece of research proposes lecturers’ connectedness with their students as a pathway to success in emergency online teaching. As the pandemic is leading to increased online teaching, future (ideally longitudinal) studies could research how this can be facilitated.

Corry, M., & Stella, J. (2018). Teacher self-efficacy in online education: A review of the literature. Research in Learning Technology, 26. DOI: 10.25304/rlt.v26.2047 Gosselin, K. P. (2009). Development and psychometric exploration of the online teaching self-efficacy inventory. Texas Tech University, Texas. Klassen, R. M., Perry, N. E., & Frenzel, A. C. (2012). Teachers’ relatedness with students: An underemphasized component of teachers’ basic psychological needs. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104, 150-165. DOI: 10.1037/a0026253 Prieto, L. (2006). College teaching self-efficacy scale (CTSES). Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas.