Teacher Willingness to Sustain Online Teaching in Vocational Education: A Post-Pandemic Survey Study

Online teaching, widely adopted as an emergency response during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, has exposed various challenges and issues within vocational education while simultaneously offering opportunities for its digital transformation. While existing studies primarily focus on online learning from the learners’ viewpoint. In contrast, this study investigates teachers’ willingness to sustain online teaching in vocational education, thereby highlighting the teachers’ viewpoint. Using survey data from 17,009 questionnaire responses collected from vocational education teachers, this study employs structural equation modeling to capture the practical challenges of online teaching and learning in this context. The study extends the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) by integrating context-specific variables. The findings demonstrate that perceived usefulness and perceived resources significantly and directly influence teachers’ willingness to sustain online teaching in vocational education. Additionally, perceived ease of use, perceived learner engagement, and perceived behavioral control exert significant indirect effects. Theoretically, this study extends the TAM by contextualizing it within vocational education. Practically, it proposes two key recommendations: (1) it advocates for the establishment of a comprehensive, accessible repository of digital teaching resources tailored to vocational contexts; (2) it underscores the importance of fostering multistakeholder collaborations to cultivate vocational education teachers’ digital pedagogical competence.