This descriptive qualitative study explores lecturers' perspectives on Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) in New Zealand Tertiary Education Institutions (TEIs) during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews with the five purposively selected lecturers from four TEIs, this article investigates the challenges and opportunities lecturers experienced in teaching during the pandemic. While the findings showed some opportunities that include enhanced flexibility, teacher creativity, and saving commute time to the workplace, they also demonstrate that the pandemic created three significant challenges of (i) socio-psychological, (ii) technological, and (iii) pedagogical nature. This study recommends that TEIs need to develop a crisis management action plan to mitigate teaching-learning difficulties in a similar kind of situation in the future. Additionally, TEIs could benefit by upskilling their lecturers and students to use digital literacy and virtual teaching and learning.