Teachers' well-being and work enjoyment in online education

While online education has many benefits, including improved access for students who are unable to attend in-person classes, many teachers struggle with the transition to online education as they must develop a new online skill set and often miss the face-to-face interaction with students. To improve and maintain teachers’ well-being and motivation, it is important to ensure they are confident about their online teaching skills and feel connected with both students and peers. Therefore, in this fellowship, we identified teachers' experiences with online education through interviews, focus groups and a survey. This revealed that teachers need to acquire new skills to teach effectively online and to find enjoyment in their work. For this, it is important that teachers are given sufficient time and space to develop these skills. Next to that, there is also a need to exchange practical knowledge and experiences with colleagues, but this does not happen much in practice. Based on this, we have identified a number of best-practices to promote job satisfaction in online education: (1) formally allocate time for teachers to develop new online materials and experiment with new teaching methods; (2) create space for sharing experiences among teachers in peer-to-peer meetings or on an online knowledge exchange platform; (3) intentionally set aside time for introductions between teachers and students, whenever possible in a physical setting.