| Summary: | We introduce the term “prolonged emergency remote teaching” to accentuate the temporal aspect of the current educational crisis. In-depth lived experiences of students and teaching staff in one engineering education institution were examined, in order to depict what being involved in an exclusively online communication feels like from the personal perspective, thus examining e-learning sustainability during the COVID-19 pandemic. Interviews with samples of students and teaching staff were conducted, and then psychological phenomenology was employed to produce rich descriptions of their personal experiences and impressions. Both the students and the faculty employees observed e-learning during the Fall semester of 2020 as challenging and artificial. Although trying to function as everything is in order, as the semester unfolded, motivation deteriorated, communication turned more and more superficial, and limitations became more prominent. For both sides, although there were some conveniences, the educational process yielded sub-optimal results and was hard to sustain; intellectual and social capital of both sides appeared to be underutilized. We present conclusions and recommendations, suggesting that modern technologies should help both sides to adapt to the new reality, instead of feeling stuck in an online “limbo”. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
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