The Role of Digital Proficiency During Online Classes among Teaching Professionals and Its Impact on Occupational Stress

The 2020 pandemic situation has led to increased use of Digital Technology, which has spread its avenue even to the field of education. To prevent the students to be deprived from education the Higher Education council and UGC mandated online classes during lockdown which made the teaching fraternity to witness the novel way of working during lockdown i.e., experiencing work from home through online mode. The current research article aims at investigating the role of digital proficiency while conducting online classes during lockdown in pandemic situation among Teaching Professionals and its impact on occupational Stress. To examine the same the sample of 180 College teachers, teaching at various degree colleges of Benagluru were asked to participate in online survey through Google form, digital proficiency and levels of occupational stress were determined by administering Occupational Stress Index developed by Dr A.K Srivatsav & Dr A.P Singh and questions pertaining to digital applications including both computer hardware and software was employed to get insight about digital proficiency. Based on the scores of digital proficiency of respondents, the teachers were categorized under two groups – Teachers with low digital proficiency N=97 and Teachers with high digital proficiency N= 83. Directional hypothesis was formulated to analyze occupational stress among the two groups, and the obtained results were statistically analyzed using independent samples ‘t’ tests. The obtained ‘t’ scores on occupational stress index indicated that there is a significant difference between both the groups. Teaching professionals with better digital proficiency experienced low level of occupational stress compared to teaching professionals with low digital proficiency indicating the alarming need for improvisation of digital proficiency.