Teaching Experience as a Key Factor in Dealing with Digital Teaching Stress

Abstract

Digital pandemic stress among university faculty has become a key issue in the contemporary era, marked by the rapid transition to online teaching. This study conducts a quantitative investigation into the teaching experience as a key explanatory variable in explaining the levels of such stress. For this purpose, a validated instrument has been used, which has been answered by a sample of 1240 university professors. The results show that, although the participating professors do not express high self-concepts of their digital competence or professional aspects, they do not express high levels of digital stress due to the pandemic. However, strong divergences have been identified between the levels of digital pandemic stress of more experienced professors and those of younger professors. Specifically, more experienced professors report lower levels of stress than younger professors, although there are no significant differences in their respective digital competencies. Consequently, the results suggest that teaching experience mitigates teaching digital stress, even when this greater experience does not concur with greater digital competence. It has also been found that the evolution of ratings with teaching experience depends on whether the professor is a specialist in scientific–technical or humanistic–social areas. Specifically, professors in scientific–technical areas with 15 to 25 years of experience are those who suffer more digital stress. Moreover, the digital stress of professors in scientific–technical areas increases between 10 and 25 years of experience, while it decreases among professors with less than 10 years of experience. In contrast, among professors in humanistic–social areas, the trend in the evolution of digital stress is the opposite: it increases among those with less than 10 years of experience and decreases among those with more than 10 years of experience.