Doha: The COVID-19 pandemic has forced schools, universities and learning and development professionals to shift rapidly from in-person to online learning.
According to the Unesco, the education of 91 percent of students worldwide was disrupted. The sudden disruption has pushed schools and teachers from around the world to seek solutions and tools that could facilitate remote teaching. The fact that students have to learn from home is referred to these days as online learning.
“However, this is not quite accurate. Education and education technology experts from around the world are careful to distinguish between online learning and emergency remote teaching (ERT),” said Touhami Abi, Manager, WISE Accelerator programme of Qatar Foundation’s World Innovation Summit for Education.
Online learning often refers to learning remotely through carefully designed and delivered lessons. It takes from six months to nine months to properly prepare an online course at university level. The reason is that schools and universities provide an entire ecosystem that surrounds the students to ensure learning happens properly which includes teachers, facilitators coordinators for content. In order for online learning to replicate that learning experience, a lot of preparation on content side, pedagogy and definition of learning outcomes is required.
“What we witness these days instead is ERT which is about minimising the damage rather than maximizing the benefits since we cannot prepare schools and teachers over night to deliver an entire curriculum remotely,” Abi told The Peninsula.
“Think about it, if a teacher wants to teach a specific lesson remotely, the students will need to all be present at an agreed upon time, have access to Internet, a laptop or a tablet and focus in front of a screen for sometimes hours. Remote teaching may sound simple. However, it is a complicated process from teachers and students’ side,” he added.
According to Abi, one of the challenges that teachers face during remote teaching is the loss of body language as a means of delivery of content. Indeed, it is well known that the majority of what we communicate to people is expressed through body language. In front of a screen, student loose access to that and it becomes hard for students to understand content and for teachers to track students’ expressions which are an indicator of whether they understood the content or not.
“Also, we cannot mention remote teaching without referring to the digital divide. Not all students have access to Internet from around the world and those who do, do not always have Internet fast enough to follow lessons all day remotely,” said Abi.
“Finally, families who have several kids, may not have enough electronic devises for all their kids. If the kids have to study all day remotely and at the same time then logistically it becomes a challenge for families. You can see that from what was mentioned above, there is a lot of complexity in remote teaching due to challenges in creating content, pedagogy and logistics,” he added.
