An evaluation of EFL teachers' burnout experiences in educational informatics network live classes during the COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 was initially reported in China in December 2019 and quickly spread all over the world and turned into a pandemic. This pandemic has led to radical changes that affect every field of social life globally. In many countries, these radical changes also indicated their effects in education and face-to-face education activities were stopped immediately. Subsequently, distance education was started at all education levels. Within the framework of pandemic measures in Turkey, the distance education process started with live lessons in all schools affiliated to the Ministry of National Education through the Education Informatics Network (EIN), one of the elements of the FATIH Project. This research aims to investigate the professional burnout experiences and opinions of EFL teachers who teach English via live lessons on EIN in the above-mentioned process and to reveal the relationship between these teachers' gender, age, education level, teaching experience and type of school variables and their burnout experiences in distance education process. The explanatory sequential research design, one of the mixed-method research designs, was used for the research design of this study. For the objectives of the study, 413 EFL teachers, who work in different cities of Turkey within the 2020-2021 academic year and selected by the convenience sampling, participated in the questionnaire which was implemented as the quantitative data collection tool. In addition to the questionnaire, 21 EFL teachers who were selected by voluntary sampling method responded to structured interview questions for the qualitative data collection phase of the study. According to the findings of the research, it was found out that EFL teachers significantly suffered from burnout in terms of Emotional Exhaustion dimension in EIN live lessons. It was also found out that the gender variable had a significant effect on the burnout experiences of EFL teachers. In accordance with this significant effect, female EFL teachers experienced more burnout than male EFL teachers in EIN live classes. Keywords: COVID-19, FATIH project, EIN, Live Classes, Burnout, EFL Teachers.