Online and Distance Learning during Lockdown Times: COVID-19 Stories

Dear colleagues,

The rapid spread of the new Coronavirus (Covid-19) has changed all aspects of life including formal education all over the world. As Covid-19 became a pandemic, many countries began to introduce various lockdown and social distancing measures, with schools and universities having to close their campuses. Teachers and school leaders had limited time to prepare for remote online teaching. These unprecedented developments provide a useful context for researchers, practitioners and policy makers to examine how teachers, students and parents respond to a public health emergency and overcome barriers to education.

The purpose of this special issue is to report empirical and theoretical work on the use of online / distance / remote and blended teaching and learning methods in all levels of educational contexts during these unprecedented times. In this special issue, we are interested in contributions that explore how remote teaching and learning methods might have helped teachers, educational leaders and policy makers to develop innovative ways of delivering lessons, managing educational institutions; how students engage with learning and study activities; and how parents support their children’s learning during the pandemic (covering the whole of the year 2020). We are interested in papers that report not only primary data, but also work based on secondary data analyses and systematic reviews of published work. We are also interested in position papers that looks into how educational institutions might need to rethink their teaching and learning provision as we learn to live with health and other emergencies such as Covid-19.

The knowledge that we gain from exploring the developments of teaching and learning approaches in many countries and educational contexts in response to the pandemic would be useful for all stake holders in education to reconsider the future of education, to meet the challenges in the months, and possibly, years to come.

Following is a short list of themes that the special issue is interested in:

1. The different pedagogical approaches that have emerged as a result of teachers’ rapid adaptation of online methods for their teaching
2. The challenges faced by school and university leaders in moving to online teaching and management of school work
3. Technological developments that help teachers and students to continue their teaching and learning
4. Students’ engagement with online delivery of teaching, strategies that they develop to learn from home while in lock down conditions
5. Parents’ involvement in their children’s learning
6. Methodological approaches used in researching this unprecedented phenomenon of learning online in lockdown conditions
7. Digital literacy skills and teachers’ professional development
8. Rapid approaches to design for online learning
9. Online assessment methods
10. Learning opportunities provided and emerged in the nonformal education sector to cope with lockdown conditions.

The contributions could be based on one or mixture of methods:

1. Primary data (using online or face to face methods) collected from teachers, students, parents, and learning technology professionals
2. Secondary data such as documents including publicly accessible videos created by teachers on showing their online teaching methods, blog posts written by teachers, and other documents available on the internet relevant to the research topic.
3. Theoretical discussions
4. Reports on technological and pedagogical developments

Dr. Palitha Edirisingha
Guest Editor

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