Practical Family Challenges of Remote Schooling during COVID-19 Pandemic in Finland.

The COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020 caused the rapid introduction of remote schooling in many countries. This transition caused a variety of challenges to families, encompassing organizing home workspaces, setting up computing equipment, and, for many parents, managing their own remote working in parallel with the schooling arrangements. This paper describes the findings from an online survey (n = 114) and an in-depth interview study (n = 14) conducted in Finland during the COVID-19 remote schooling phase. Focusing on issues surrounding technology usage in the family setting, we report on the array of applications parents and children were required to manage, strategies to share ICT equipment within families, spatial organizational issues and the high levels of flexibility needed from parents and other stakeholders to enable the remote schooling.