Teachers' burnout in online university courses in the time of pandemic

SAMPLE: Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Burnout is a serious syndrome related to those professions with people - to- people interactions and teachers are among those who suffer burnout that can adversely influence both teachers and students. The article discusses the difficulties experienced by university staff in teaching via distance learning for full-time university students during the coronavirus pandemic. The staff of the universities in Russian had to start a distant learning online form of education from the middle of March 2020. This presented new challenges for teachers in universities. These difficulties, among others, influenced the formation of professional burnout of university teachers. The study was conducted in the form of a survey of the teachers who provided online classes with students. To determine the level of burnout, the Maslach (1980) questionnaire in the adaptation of Vodopianova (2013) was used. The questionnaire on the factors of difficulties in education online teaching was developed. The study was conducted at the beginning of June 2020. 66 teachers of Higher education replied the answers in the questionnaires. Most of them (94%) were teachers of foreign languages at universities. The aim of this research was to evaluate the burnout of university teachers and estimate some factors that influenced their burnout at the time of pandemic. It was found that the gender factor of teachers did not affect their burnout, but differences in the level of the components of burnout was found. The objectives of the present study are to extend prior studies on teacher burnout in online teaching by exploring factors which contribute to language teachers' feelings of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and reduced personal accomplishment and estimate the factors that had the negative impact on the process of education