essay about home learning during a pandemic

Capturing the benefits of remote learning

How education experts are applying lessons learned in the pandemic to promote positive outcomes for all students

Vol. 52 No. 6 Print version: page 46

• Schools and Classrooms

With schools open again after more than a year of teaching students outside the classroom, the pandemic sometimes feels like a distant memory. The return to classrooms this fall brings major relief for many families and educators. Factors such as a lack of reliable technology and family support, along with an absence of school resources, resulted in significant academic setbacks, not to mention stress for everyone involved.

But for all the downsides of distance learning, educators, psychologists, and parents have seen some benefits as well. For example, certain populations of students found new ways to be more engaged in learning, without the distractions and difficulties they faced in the classroom, and the general challenges of remote learning and the pandemic brought mental health to the forefront of the classroom experience.

Peter Faustino, PsyD, a school psychologist in Scarsdale, New York, said the pandemic also prompted educators and school psychologists to find creative new ways of ensuring students’ emotional and academic well-being. “So many students were impacted by the pandemic, so we couldn’t just assume they would find resources on their own,” said Faustino. “We had to work hard at figuring out new ways to connect with them.”

Here are some of the benefits of distance learning that school psychologists and educators have observed and the ways in which they’re implementing those lessons post-pandemic, with the goal of creating a more equitable, productive environment for all students.

Prioritizing mental health

Faustino said that during the pandemic, he had more mental health conversations with students, families, and teachers than ever. “Because COVID-19 affected everyone, we’re now having mental health discussions as school leaders on a daily and weekly basis,” he said.

This renewed focus on mental health has the potential to improve students’ well-being in profound ways—starting with helping them recover from the pandemic’s effects. In New York City, for example, schools are hiring more than 600 new clinicians, including psychologists , to screen students’ mental health and help them process pandemic-related trauma and adjust to the “new normal” of attending school in person.

Educators and families are also realizing the importance of protecting students’ mental health more generally—not only for their health and safety but for their learning. “We’ve been seeing a broader appreciation for the fact that mental health is a prerequisite for learning rather than an extracurricular pursuit,” said Eric Rossen, PhD, director of professional development and standards at the National Association of School Psychologists.

As a result, Rossen hopes educators will embed social and emotional learning components into daily instruction. For example, teachers could teach mindfulness techniques in the classroom and take in-the-moment opportunities to help kids resolve conflicts or manage stress.

Improved access to mental health resources in schools is another positive effect. Because of physical distancing guidelines, school leaders had to find ways to deliver mental health services remotely, including via online referrals and teletherapy with school psychologists and counselors.

Early in the pandemic, Faustino said he was hesitant about teletherapy’s effectiveness; now, he hopes to continue offering a virtual option. Online scheduling and remote appointments make it easier for students to access mental health resources, and some students even enjoy virtual appointments more, as they can attend therapy in their own spaces rather than showing up in the counselor’s office. For older students, Faustino said that level of comfort often leads to more productive, open conversations.

Autonomy as a key to motivation

Research suggests that when students have more choices about their materials and activities, they’re more motivated—which may translate to increased learning and academic success. In a 2016 paper, psychology researcher Allan Wigfield, PhD, and colleagues make the case that control and autonomy in reading activities can improve both motivation and comprehension ( Child Development Perspectives , Vol. 10, No. 3 ).

During the period of online teaching, some students had opportunities to learn at their own pace, which educators say improved their learning outcomes—especially in older students. In a 2020 survey of more than 600 parents, researchers found the second-most-valued benefit of distance learning was flexibility—not only in schedule but in method of learning.

In a recent study, researchers found that 18% of parents pointed to greater flexibility in a child’s schedule or way of learning as the biggest benefit or positive outcome related to remote learning ( School Psychology , Roy, A., et al., in press).

This individualized learning helps students find more free time for interests and also allows them to conduct their learning at a time they’re most likely to succeed. During the pandemic, Mark Gardner, an English teacher at Hayes Freedom High School in Camas, Washington, said he realized how important student-centered learning is and that whether learning happens should take precedence over how and when it occurs.

For example, one of his students thrived when he had the choice to do work later at night because he took care of his siblings during the day. Now, Gardner posts homework online on Sundays so students can work at their own pace during the week. “Going forward, we want to create as many access points as we can for kids to engage with learning,” he said.

Rosanna Breaux , PhD, an assistant professor of psychology and assistant director of the Child Study Center at Virginia Tech, agrees. “I’d like to see this flexibility continue in some way, where—similar to college—students can guide their own learning based on their interests or when they’re most productive,” she said.

During the pandemic, many educators were forced to rethink how to keep students engaged. Rossen said because many school districts shared virtual curricula during the period of remote learning, older students could take more challenging or interesting courses than they could in person. The same is true for younger students: Megan Hibbard, a teacher in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, said many of her fifth graders enjoyed distance learning more than in-person because they could work on projects that aligned with their interests.

“So much of motivation is discovering the unique things the student finds interesting,” said Hunter Gehlbach, PhD, a professor and vice dean at the Johns Hopkins School of Education. “The more you can facilitate students spending more time on the things they’re really interested in, the better.”

Going forward, Rossen hopes virtual curricula will allow students greater opportunities to pursue their interests, such as by taking AP classes, foreign languages, or vocational electives not available at their own schools.

Conversely, Hibbard’s goal is to increase opportunities for students to pursue their interests in the in-person setting. For example, she plans to increase what she calls “Genius Hours,” a time at the end of the school day when students can focus on high-interest projects they’ll eventually share with the class.

Better understanding of children's needs

One of the most important predictors of a child’s success in school is parental involvement in their education. For example, in a meta-analysis of studies, researchers linked parental engagement in their middle schoolers’ education with greater measures of success (Hill, N. E., & Tyson, D. F., Developmental Psychology , Vol. 45, No. 3, 2009).

During the pandemic, parents had new opportunities to learn about their kids and, as a result, help them learn. According to a study by Breaux and colleagues, many parents reported that the pandemic allowed them a better understanding of their child’s learning style, needs, or curriculum.

James C. Kaufman , PhD, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut and the father of an elementary schooler and a high schooler, said he’s had a front-row seat for his sons’ learning for the first time. “Watching my kids learn and engage with classmates has given me some insight in how to parent them,” he said.

Stephen Becker , PhD, a pediatric psychologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, said some parents have observed their children’s behavior or learning needs for the first time, which could prompt them to consider assessment and Individualized Education Program (IEP) services. Across the board, Gehlbach said parents are realizing how they can better partner with schools to ensure their kids’ well-being and academic success.

For example, Samantha Marks , PsyD, a Florida-based clinical psychologist, said she realized how much help her middle school daughter, a gifted and talented student with a 504 plan (a plan for how the school will offer support for a student’s disability) for anxiety, needed with independence. “Bringing the learning home made it crystal clear what we needed to teach our daughter to be independent and improve executive functioning” she said. “My takeaway from this is that more parents need to be involved in their children’s education in a healthy, helpful way.”

Marks also gained a deeper understanding of her daughter’s mental health needs. Through her 504 plan, she received help managing her anxiety at school—at home, though, Marks wasn’t always available to help, which taught her the importance of helping her daughter manage her anxiety independently.

Along with parents gaining a deeper understanding of their kids’ needs, the pandemic also prompted greater parent participation in school. For example, Rossen said his kids’ school had virtual school board meetings; he hopes virtual options continue for events like back-to-school information sessions and parenting workshops. “These meetings are often in the evening, and if you’re a single parent or sole caregiver, you may not want to pay a babysitter in order to attend,” he said.

Brittany Greiert, PhD, a school psychologist in Aurora, Colorado, says culturally and linguistically diverse families at her schools benefited from streamlined opportunities to communicate with administrators and teachers. Her district used an app that translates parent communication into 150 languages. Parents can also remotely participate in meetings with school psychologists or teachers, which Greiert says she plans to continue post-pandemic.

Decreased bullying

During stay-at-home orders, kids with neurodevelopmental disorders experienced less bullying than pre-pandemic (McFayden, T. C., et al., Journal of Rural Mental Health , No. 45, Vol. 2, 2021). According to 2019 research, children with emotional, behavioral, and physical health needs experience increased rates of bullying victimization ( Lebrun-Harris, L. A., et al., ), and from the U.S. Department of Education suggests the majority of bullying takes place in person and in unsupervised areas (PDF) .

Scott Graves , PhD, an associate professor of educational studies at The Ohio State University and a member of APA’s Coalition for Psychology in Schools and Education (CPSE), said the supervision by parents and teachers in remote learning likely played a part in reducing bullying. As a result, he’s less worried his Black sons will be victims of microaggressions and racist behavior during online learning.

Some Asian American families also report that remote learning offered protection against racism students may have experienced in person. Shereen Naser, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at Cleveland State University and a member of CPSE, and colleagues found that students are more comfortable saying discriminatory things in school when their teachers are also doing so; Naser suspects this trickle-down effect is less likely to happen when students learn from home ( School Psychology International , 2019).

Reductions in bullying and microaggressions aren’t just beneficial for students’ long-term mental health. Breaux said less bullying at school results in less stress, which can improve students’ self-esteem and mood—both of which impact their ability to learn.

Patricia Perez, PhD, an associate professor of international psychology at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology and a member of CPSE, said it’s important for schools to be proactive in providing spaces for support and cultural expression for students from vulnerable backgrounds, whether in culture-specific clubs, all-school assemblies that address racism and other diversity-related topics, or safe spaces to process feelings with teachers.

According to Rossen, many schools are already considering how to continue supporting students at risk for bullying, including by restructuring the school environment.

One principal, Rossen said, recently switched to single-use bathrooms to avoid congregating in those spaces once in-person learning commences to maintain social distancing requirements. “The principal received feedback from students about how going to the bathroom is much less stressful for these students in part due to less bullying,” he said.

More opportunities for special needs students

In Becker and Breaux’s research, parents of students with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), particularly those with a 504 plan and IEP, reported greater difficulties with remote learning. But some students with special learning needs—including those with IEPs and 504 plans—thrived in an at-home learning environment. Recent reporting in The New York Times suggests this is one reason many students want to continue online learning.

According to Cara Laitusis, PhD, a principal research scientist at Educational Testing Service ( ETS ) and a member of CPSE, reduced distractions may improve learning outcomes for some students with disabilities that impact attention in a group setting. “In assessments, small group or individual settings are frequently requested accommodations for some students with ADHD, anxiety, or autism. Being in a quiet place alone without peers for part of the instructional day may also allow for more focus,” she said. However, she also pointed out the benefits of inclusion in the classroom for developing social skills with peers.

Remote learning has improved academic outcomes for students with different learning needs, too. Marks said her seventh-grade daughter, a visual learner, appreciated the increase in video presentations and graphics. Similarly, Hibbard said many of her students who struggle to grasp lessons on the first try have benefited from the ability to watch videos over again until they understand. Post-pandemic, she plans to record bite-size lessons—for example, a 1-minute video of a long division problem—so her students can rewatch and process at their own rate.

Learners with anxiety also appreciate the option not to be in the classroom, because the social pressures of being surrounded by peers can make it hard to focus on academics. “Several of my students have learned more in the last year simply due to the absence of anxiety,” said Rosie Reid, an English teacher at Ygnacio Valley High School in Concord, California, and a 2019 California Teacher of the Year. “It’s just one less thing to negotiate in a learning environment.”

On online learning platforms, it’s easier for kids with social anxiety or shyness to participate. One of Gardner’s students with social anxiety participated far more in virtual settings and chats. Now, Gardner is brainstorming ways to encourage students to chat in person, such as by projecting a chat screen on the blackboard.

Technology has helped school psychologists better engage students, too. For example, Greiert said the virtual setting gave her a new understanding of her students’ personalities and needs. “Typing out their thoughts, they were able to demonstrate humor or complex thoughts they never demonstrated in person,” she said. “I really want to keep incorporating technology into sessions so kids can keep building on their strengths.”

Reid says that along with the high school students she teaches, she’s seen her 6-year-old daughter benefit from learning at her own pace in the familiarity of her home. Before the pandemic, she was behind academically, but by guiding her own learning—writing poems, reading books, playing outside with her siblings—she’s blossomed. “For me, as both a mother and as a teacher, this whole phenomenon has opened the door to what education can be,” Reid said.

Eleanor Di Marino-Linnen, PhD, a psychologist and superintendent of the Rose Tree Media School District in Media, Pennsylvania, says the pandemic afforded her district a chance to rethink old routines and implement new ones. “As challenging as it is, it’s definitely an exciting time to be in education when we have a chance to reenvision what schools have looked like for many years,” she said. “We want to capitalize on what we’ve learned.”

Further reading

Why are some kids thriving during remote learning? Fleming, N., Edutopia, 2020

Remote learning has been a disaster for many students. But some kids have thrived. Gilman, A., The Washington Post , Oct. 3, 2020

A preliminary examination of key strategies, challenges, and benefits of remote learning expressed by parents during the COVID-19 pandemic Roy, A., et al., School Psychology , in press

Remote learning during COVID-19: Examining school practices, service continuation, and difficulties for adolescents with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder Becker S. P., et al., Journal of Adolescent Health , 2020

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Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

The sudden transition to online learning: Teachers’ experiences of teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic

Contributed equally to this work with: Elham Goudarzi, Shirin Hasanvand

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Student Research Committee, Lorestan University of Medical Sciences, Khorramabad, Iran

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Social Determinants of Health Research Center, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Lorestan University of Medical Sciences, Khorramabad, Iran

Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

¶ ‡ SR and MA also contributed equally to this work.

Affiliation Clinical Education Research Center, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran

• Elham Goudarzi, 
• Shirin Hasanvand, 
• Shahin Raoufi, 
• Mitra Amini

• Published: November 16, 2023
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287520
• Peer Review
• Reader Comments

Introduction

The sudden transition from face-to-face teaching to virtual remote education and the need to implement it during COVID-19 initially posed specific challenges to educational institutions. Identifying and understanding teachers’ experiences pave the way for discovering and meeting educational needs. This study explored faculty members’ teaching experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Materials and methods

The qualitative descriptive design via conventional content analysis was used. It was conducted from January 13, 2020, to May 10, 2022. In-depth interviews (online and in-person) of ten faculty members, three managers, and one staff from Lorestan University of Medical Sciences were conducted. They were purposefully selected with maximum variation. Simultaneously with data collection, analysis was performed using the approach Graneheim and Lundman proposed (2004). Lincoln and Goba’s criteria were used to obtain the study’s rigor.

Six categories emerged from the data: education in the shadow of the crisis, Challenges related to the teaching-learning process, Blurred boundaries between personal and professional lives, Positive consequences of e-learning, Trying to deal with the crisis, And dealing with the crisis.

Conclusions

Initially, teachers faced several challenges in the teaching-learning process and even in their personal life. However, with time, the actions of the teachers and the managers caused an increase in the quality of education. However, planning and foresight are needed in developing countries, including Iran, to appropriately face and optimally manage similar crises and move towards blended learning.

Citation: Goudarzi E, Hasanvand S, Raoufi S, Amini M (2023) The sudden transition to online learning: Teachers’ experiences of teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. PLoS ONE 18(11): e0287520. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287520

Editor: Muhammad Arsyad Subu, School of Health Binawan: Universitas Binawan, INDONESIA

Received: September 7, 2022; Accepted: June 7, 2023; Published: November 16, 2023

Copyright: © 2023 Goudarzi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All interview files are available from figshare, https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.23599155.v1 .

Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Abbreviations: F2F, Face-to-face; ICT, Information and communications technology

In late December 2019, a new subvariant of COVID-19 appeared in Wuhan, China, spreading rapidly worldwide [ 1 ]. The transmission rate of the virus and the subsequent pandemic were so significant that in the first month of 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a state of emergency [ 2 ]. The first Iranian coronavirus case was officially announced in Qom on February 19, 2020 [ 3 ].

This global pandemic affected all areas of human life, including medical education [ 4 ], and disrupted face-to-face(F2F) learning worldwide. That is, F2F learning was suspended at medical universities, particularly in third-world countries, where the sudden change in educational planning was an inevitable consequence of the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic [ 5 ]. Insufficiency of resources and poor infrastructure severely damaged low-income countries [ 6 ]. In response to the closure of education, UNESCO recommended using distance education programs and related educational platforms by educational institutes to benefit from distance education and minimize any disruption in the learning-teaching process [ 7 ].

Distance education is a planned type of education where teaching and learning occur in different environments [ 8 ]. In recent years, the development of distance education has significantly contributed to promoting learning-teaching quality and expanding educational justice [ 9 ]. Certain advantages and disadvantages can be attributed to distance education. Its benefits include the feasibility of teaching regardless of time and place, cost-effectiveness [ 10 ], non-necessity of physical attendance [ 11 ], the existence of a variety of choices [ 12 ], saving time [ 10 ], studying simultaneously with working [ 12 ], and the development of participatory and independent types of learning [ 13 ]. Moreover, high probability of lack of concentration, the need for complex technology [ 12 ], reduced social interactions [ 14 ], unstable internet connection [ 13 ], the inability to comprehend and interpret students’ facial expressions, and inability to hold practical and laboratory meetings are also among the disadvantages of distance education [ 6 ].

One important change after the campus closure was the transition from face-to-face universities to virtual universities to prevent the spread of COVID-19 [ 15 ]. In countries such as Italy, Spain, China, the USA, and even Brazil, distance learning has been widely used during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in medical education [ 16 ]. The use of distance education commenced in Iran with the emergence of the coronavirus. Although distance education was initially presented to students irregularly using social media, Iranian universities gradually adopted a systematic version of distance education using a centralized system of learning management according to the instructions issued by educational authorities. However, this system did not turn out to be an ideal one. Students and faculty members faced challenges such as slow internet speed, limited cyberspace to upload e-content, and reduced teacher-student interactions [ 17 ].

As was indicated in a study on the challenges encountered by faculty concerning distance education, a flawed organizational culture or the lack of a culture of working with e-learning tools such as computers, and the failure to train faculty members about how to operate these tools were also among the essential barriers to efficient distance education. Furthermore, lack of equipment, slow internet speed, lack of sufficient cyberspace for uploading educational materials, being time-consuming and costly, and ignoring the intellectual property rights, such as unauthorized copying of the content and violation of copyright principles in the cyberlearning environment were other challenges raised by the participants [ 13 ]. In another study that focused on the experiences of teachers about distance education during the COVID-19 pandemic, many students expressed their concerns about losing contact with their peers, separation from academic communities, hardware and software inconveniences, lack of a quiet environment, and a separate room at home to attend virtual classes, lack of access to libraries and resources, and deprivation from clinical and laboratory activities. Faculty members complained about increased responsibility and workload and emphasized the necessity of having access to comprehensive mental health services that should be provided for both themselves and students [ 18 ]. In Marek et al. (2021) study, faculty who converted classes to remove learning during COVID-19 experienced much higher workloads and tension than in F2F classes [ 19 ].

A systematic review showed that fewer studies had been conducted in remote emergency teaching or e-learning during the Covid-19 pandemic [ 15 ]. Few studies, especially quantitative, have been conducted in Iran, and faculty members’ experiences have yet to be investigated. This issue is a significant gap because it cannot be supposed that these experiences are similar to those in different cultural and social contexts. Thus, considering the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and its adverse effects on education worldwide, the disruption of teaching-learning processes in universities and teachers, and students’ unpreparedness, it seems necessary to investigate teachers’ experiences and deal with distance education. Such an investigation can contribute to the identification of the facilitators of and impediments to distance education if the COVID-19 pandemic persists or similar crises emerge. Thus, this study explored the teachers’ teaching experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This qualitative study used a conventional content analysis from January 13, 2020, to May 10, 2022, to describe the professor’s teaching experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Content analysis is a study method for forming replicable and proper inferences from data to their context. It provides knowledge, new insights, a manifestation of facts, and a practical action guide. The aim is to acquire a condensed and comprehensive description of the phenomenon, and the result of the analysis is concepts or categories depicting the phenomenon. Conventional content analysis is used when there are no previous studies or research literature about the phenomenon, or it needs to be more cohesive. Researchers do not utilize predetermined categories. Rather, it lets categories and category labels flow from the data [ 20 ].

Participants and data collection

Participants included ten faculty members, three administrators, and one staff of the Department of Education affiliated with Lorestan University of Medical Sciences (Western Iran). Participants were selected by purposeful and maximum variation sampling(gender, marital status, work experience, having experience in e-learning, specialty). Inclusion criteria were willingness to participate in the study and share their experiences.

The data were gathered through unstructured in-depth F2F or electronic interviews by the first author under the supervision of the second author. Since the second author was a faculty, the first author took responsibility for the interviews. However, the second author supervised the interviews because of his experience in qualitative research.

Due to the absence of some faculty members in the university, particularly at the beginning of the study, the interviews were conducted mainly electronically using either telephone or Adobe Connect video-conferencing software and later in person under health protocols. Also, F2F interviews were conducted with the participants’ consent at their workplaces.

The interviews began with questions: "Could you please let us know about your teaching experiences since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic? What challenges did you face? How did you manage your class?" The participants were further investigated by answering probing questions such as "Could you explain more?" and "Could you please give an example?". The interviews were done individually and lasted an average of 20 to 50 minutes.

The data were recorded on a digital audio recorder. Field observations complemented the interviews. Sampling continued until data saturation when the collected data confirmed the previous data. Data saturation occurred after the 12th interview. To make sure two more interviews were conducted. Overall, 14 interviews were conducted with 14 participants. All the participants volunteered to participate in the study, and no one refused. The time and the place of the interviews (F2F) were arranged with the participants.

Data analysis

The data analysis was conducted simultaneously by collecting data using the approach proposed by Granehim and Lundman(2004) with the following phases: 1) immediate transcription of interviews, 2) listening to them to obtain a general perception, 3) identification of significant parts and initial codes(the label of a meaning unit), 4) classification of similar initial codes in broader categories (creating categories), and 5) determination of the hidden content in the data [ 21 ]. Hence, after listening to the interviews, they were transcribed and read several times. In the next phase, the significant units were identified and coded. We consider a meaning unit as words, sentences, or paragraphs containing dimensions about each other through their content and context. The condensed meaning units were abstracted and labeled by a code. Subsequently, the codes were classified using a constant comparison technique, identifying differences and similarities, and subcategories were identified. Finally, the findings were compared, and categories were determined. Data analysis was carried out using the MAXQDA 10 software.

Ethics approval and the consent to participate.

The present study was conducted under the Declaration of Helsinki. The code of ethics was also obtained from the Ethical Committee of the Vice-Chancellery for Research and Technology affiliated with Lorestan University of Medical Sciences (Code: I.R.LUMS.REC.1399.242). Providing the necessary explanations about the research objectives, we obtained written informed consent from all the participants. The subjects were allowed to record audio. The first author kept the recorded files in a locked file to ensure the security of the data.

Guba and Lincoln’s (1994) criteria, i.e., credibility, dependability, confirmability, and transferability, were used to ensure the trustworthiness of the data. Participants with experience in the studied phenomenon were selected to increase the credibility of the data. The researcher’s prolonged engagement and contact with participants (more than one year) were also considered. Moreover, more than one of the authors (the first and second authors) participated in the data analysis. Member-checking was also used. An attempt was made to improve data transferability by describing the participants’ culture, context, and characteristics. The audit trail approach and maximum variation were used to ensure transferability. People with an experience in qualitative research (Outside researchers) evaluated the data analysis process to ensure the findings were consistent.

The intercoder rater is a scale of the agreement between multiple coders about how similar data should be coded [ 22 ]. An inter-coder reliability analysis using Cohen’s Kappa statistic was conducted to determine consistency between coders. Cohen’s Kappa coefficient of agreement s was 0.871.

Fourteen participants participated in this study. Table 1 provides information about the participants.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287520.t001

The qualitative interviews extracted 1215 initial codes, 28 subcategories, and six main categories. Table 2 presents subcategories and categories extracted from the interviews.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287520.t002

Category 1: Education in the shadow of the crisis

University closures necessitated the pursuit of distance education. Nevertheless, many faculty members and administrators thought they faced a temporary crisis. Thus, no significant measure was taken at the onset of the crisis. According to one of the participants, upon the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was maintained that the disease would disappear soon. Hence, no intense action was taken in the first month.

1.1. The idea of being temporary.

Many teachers thought the crisis was temporary, so no particular action was taken early. One of the participants said: ”The disease would disappear soon , so no special action was taken in the first month of the disease”(P1) .

1.2. Being unpredictable and uncertainty.

During this period, the teaching-learning process fluctuated, and faculty members were undecided. Moreover, some hospital wards were closed due to a lack of patients, decreased days of student internships, and a reduced variety of hospital cases. One of the participants said: "In the first months of the crisis , we underwent extremely unpleasant experiences and did not know what to do in that situation . On the one hand , we were worried about the students . On the other hand , we had to reduce , for example , the number of internship days . Furthermore , there were almost no patients in the wards because people were full of fear and panic" (P2) .

1.3. Educational confusion.

The sudden transition in education from F2F to distance education confused teaching and reduced the quality of teaching. As one of the participants mentioned: "Timely preparing all the educational content for students was another challenge for us . Inevitably , this preparation was prone to delay . I can assert that 99% of the faculty members could not provide the educational content for distance education without delay in the first semester following the COVID-19 pandemic because all the courses were offered to students within the distance education framework" (p9) .

1.4. Life insecurity.

Despite the widespread use of distance education in universities, some institutions face particular challenges. Medical students need to take internships in clinical settings. The fear of contracting the disease and the insecurity of life left many educators and administrators with moral and professional challenges. Some clinical faculty members were dealing with the threats posed by COVID-19 in hospitals. Moreover, concerns about the spread of the disease adversely affected the quality and quantity of clinical sessions. As one of the faculty members said:

" in this period , the stress and tension were caused by the COVID-19 pandemic rather than teaching . I feel stressed out every time I attend class , but this time the stress was caused by the question of death or survival . " (p8)

Another said:

"We were exposed to a death threat when we attended the hospital to teach students in this environment . " Every day there were several confirmed COVID-19 cases in the hospital . I remember I contracted the coronavirus the day after examining a confirmed COVID-19 patient (P13) .

1.5. Teachers’ concerns about the failure to learn from students.

Some faculty members expressed concerns about students’ failure to learn practical courses and the subsequent weakening of students’ fundamental and practical knowledge and skills. One of the Midwifery faculty members stated: "I was supposed to teach a 7th-semester student who has never been present in either a cesarean surgery or natural childbirth event in the hospital . This student will graduate in the following semester . I wonder if she can perform her duties as a hospital staff (p12) .

Category 2: Challenges related to the teaching-learning process

There were several challenges regarding interpersonal interactions, assessment, network connection, and educational materials development in the teaching-learning process.

2.1. Decreased quality of interpersonal interactions.

The lack of inclusive participation and direct interactions between teachers and students adversely affected the quality of education. A female faculty member said:

"Interactions , eye contact , and in any case , some emotional-psychological factors between teachers and students are eliminated in distance education" (P4) . "The main problem we had with e-Learning was that we were not in touch with students , and they did not have the opportunity to visit us " (P8) .

2.2. Authentication challenge.

Classroom management is complex in online classes due to the physical absence of teachers, particularly in large classes.

"Coordination of the class time with students was one of the problems I encountered in distance education . Normally , students are expected to attend the class on time following our announcement of the class time . However , some students failed to attend the class on time" (p5) . "It is difficult to coordinate all students in a virtual classroom" (p9) . Another faculty member stated that "it is hard to control a class with a large population" (p12) .

One of the significant concerns of faculty members was the problem of student identification and teachers’ uncertainty about the presence of students in online classes. Some faculty members could not ensure the students’ full-time presence in online classes: "I do not know if the person taking the test is the student or someone else . Thus , identity verification is a major problem . " (p1)

2.3. Assessment challenges.

One of the challenges for faculty members during this period was the limitation in preparing the test questions. They had to prepare new questions at the end of every semester due to the possibility of question leaks: "Students had the chance to take screenshots of questions , which means that the questions could not be reused , and the faculty members had to redesign the questions at the end of every semester . " (p1)

Many faculty members considered students’ copying of one anothers’ homework, cheating, and negligence of ethical principles in preparing their assignments among the disadvantages of distance education: "Concerning the disadvantages of distance education , I can safely assert that the most notable shortcoming of this type of education was the inaccurate assessment of students’ knowledge . It is unclear who is taking the test . Is it the student , a friend , or someone who has been paid to take the test ? " (p1) .

Obtaining unrealistic grades by cheating on each other and copying the answers to questions from the internet has led to a decline in the quality of education and the impossibility of distinguishing between intelligent and weak students. As one of the faculty members mentioned, "A student with the overall average of grades that ranged from 14–15 has now the overall average of 19 ! Does it mean that all of them have become geniuses ? What has happened ? They are indeed cheating ! " (p3) .

2.4. Depreciation of teachers’ equipment.

One of the requirements of distance education is to provide suitable hardware equipment. Some faculty members complained about the depreciation of equipment and personal computers due to frequent transportation to the university and their continuous use because of the lack of a proper hardware system to hold classes. "The teachers had to use their equipment . Many of us did not have access to the necessary audio-visual equipment at the university" (p2) .

2.5. Teachers’ low skills and knowledge of ICT.

Due to the critical situation, teachers were forced to use distance education, while many were unfamiliar with virtual education technologies. This issue caused confusion and confusion in their minds. One of the professors said:

“Professors have a problem with producing content , and how to upload it ? ” What exactly is this learning management system ? Many professors do not know the system either” (p3) .

One o f the managers also confirmed this issue and said:

“In the beginning , we had many problems because maybe 99% of our users were people who had not used the learning management system before this space and were not familiar with it . ” (p11)

2.6. Teachers’ resistance to a sudden change in the teaching strategy.

Some faculty members resisted this abrupt change in the teaching strategy: "At the beginning of using Navid website (our native learning management system) , initially our colleagues and then students resisted the use of this system" (p2) .

Another faculty member stated that;

"The use of distance education had already commenced before the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic , but most faculty members refused to teach within the framework prepared for distance education . They did not want to trouble themselves . Since they did not use the Navid LMS before the emergence of the crisis caused by the coronavirus , they needed help to cope with it during the crisis . They do not perform their tasks adequately . Every week , they were called to be reminded of their tasks (p3) .

2.7. Network connection issues.

The preparation of adequate infrastructure and the equipment required for communication and internet connection is highly significant in the development of distance education.

"The lack of a high-speed internet connection was a significant problem adversely affecting this type of education . Another faculty member complained about the inconveniencies related to uploading the educational content , which was time-consuming that sometimes took several hours" (p7) . "Moreover , low-speed internet at the university forced us to participate in online classes at home , where we had access to high-speed internet" (p4) .

2.8. Insufficient support.

Many faculty members complained about the lack of full-time support, a fundamental task of I.T. men. Hence, technical problems that were not resolved aggravated the situation: "They did not respond to our hardware and software questions . " (p6) .

2.9. The challenges in developing e-content.

Faculty members were not skillful in ICDL. Thus, they were not familiar with content development technologies. The ultimate consequence was the production of non-standard content. Moreover, the lack of a quiet environment at home to record audio made it difficult for them to produce the content. One of the faculty members with previous experience in e-learning said: "The teachers experience problems producing and uploading the content" (p3) .

A male faculty member who had twins said: " I need a quiet room to produce the content at home , but I have twins who are almost one year old . The loud sound of their crying and playing was an obstacle to content production" (p12).

2.10. Weaknesses in the implementation of practice-oriented training.

Practical courses are highly significant in medical universities. However, due to the closure of universities, only theoretical courses were offered to students. Consequently, laboratory and clinical courses were not offered regularly. Furthermore, no standard simulators or special clinical and laboratory training tools existed. "The difficulties with distance education aggravate fields of studies with many practical units , such as nursing , medical operating room technology , laboratory sciences , and medicine . Students’ attendance in class is necessary for several of the courses of these fields , and the use of simulators cannot efficiently meet the requirements of practical courses" (P3) .

2.11. Students and teachers’ misuse of distance education.

From the faculty members’ perspective, students refused to attend online classes on time, participate attentively in the classes, study the electronic content on time, and do homework under various pretexts during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Students prefer to have a classmate receive educational materials from their teachers to share them with them in the groups they create on social media networks such as WhatsApp and Telegram" (p2) . "Skyroom (a Persian version of Adobe Connect) could be an efficient software for distance teaching , but most students found different pretexts to justify their absence in online classes . They would claim that the teacher’s voice is not clear , the video is frequently interrupted , our internet connection or the power has failed" (p8) .

Unfortunately, there was no reliable monitoring system to evaluate faculty members’ performance in the teaching-learning process, and this disadvantage caused several irregularities.

"Some faculty members do not take e-learning seriously . The teacher , for instance , uploads a file while there is no content in the uploaded file" (p3) . Some faculty members uploaded only three files for a two-credit course , while they were expected to prepare and upload at least 12 files (p6) .

3. Blurred boundaries between personal and professional lives

According to the faculty, e-learning was time-consuming. It increased their workloads and interfered with their professional and personal roles. The faculty members said e-content development during the COVID-19 pandemic was time-consuming.

3.1. Time-consuming distance education.

content development during the COVID-19 pandemic was time-consuming and required time and energy, especially since the professors were not skilled enough. Some problems most professors mentioned were teacher involvement during non-office hours, time-consuming voicing of files, or re-voicing content due to hoarseness during voicing. “If normally , I would check the slide a quarter of an hour before I go to class and leave , but not now ! I would have to spend several hours now، Files and audio , that one and a half or two hours of my session now took four times that time” (p2)

Another English teacher said, "To prepare the file , I had a series of problems . I had to write the whole text of the book in English or scan it and convert it into a file in PowerPointFor each lesson , for example , I prepared 20 slides , each of which I had to write six to seven English lines; the interval when I was recording the sound was very difficult , meaning that I could , for example , mispronounce the word myself" (p12)

One of the professors of epidemiology said: "For example , I used to voice the complications of Quid on the files , and because the disease was unknown , I also talked about COVID , and then when we went forward , we saw that the risk factors for this disease had changed . The rate of change has changed , then the conversations have become old , and , for example , the prevention method has changed , and now we have to do this new-sounding file again . It was not that we had to leave the same file every semester; we had to update these files every time , which was time-consuming” (p9) .

3.2. Increase workload.

With the virtualization at once, the professors’ workload increased significantly, development of standard content Increased the workload of the university’s e-learning department; responding to faculty problems was one of the issues that multiplied the workload of faculty and staff.

One of the professors in charge of developing internship programs said:

“It used to be that we had to put a program on the site from the beginning of the semester , but I can tell you that we wrote maybe 7 to 8 programs in the previous semester , and that put a lot of my work and that of my co-worker into the realm of bed and education” . (p2) " As I said , we used to see students in class , but now we have to be online 24 hours and constantly answering to students , which caused us to devote much family time to this work " (p6) .

3.3. Interference between work and nonwork roles and family restrictions.

The full-time presence of teachers at home and the introduction of virtual education led to role interference, resulting in changes in expectations and dissatisfaction among family members. Many professors confirmed this issue. This role interference was especially evident for teachers with younger children. " Now our work problems have been brought to the family , both child and spouse . My child has been arguing with me many times in the virtual classroom because I said I am the head of the virtual classroom . He does not know his childish needs , But I have to be responsible because my work environment is one with home , which has diminished our mother’s and my wife’s roles" (p6) .

On the other hand, gathering family members at home due to corona restrictions caused noise and congestion in the home environment. They led to a lack of focus and increased psychological pressure on teachers to produce content and hold online classes. This issue led to restrictions on family members, such as forcing children to remain silent. Consider deleting some family plans.

One of the teachers who had a young child said,

“I will never forgive myself . I beat my children ،Because it happened in the middle of the sound; they suddenly entered the room and argued or , for example , asked a question " (p7) “When one’s work environment becomes one with the living environment , many restrictions are created for the family . For example , I had to silence the whole family during class hours،The child should not watch the movie while the house was a space for rest , but because I had a virtual class or recorded content , for example , the noise of the environment was very annoying , and it made me put some restrictions on my family” (p6) “It was challenging , the family was distraught , that is , I had to tell the family to go to that room , and I would have the file in another room” (p12) .

4. Positive consequences of e-learning

4.1. flexibility..

Despite the difficulties experienced and explained by the majority of the teachers, a few of them mentioned the benefits of e-learning. Flexibility is one of the features of e-learning. More precisely, the implementation of distance education does not depend on time and place. Moreover, it does not require a particular physical space shared by students and the teacher. Confirming the issue of flexibility in distance education, one of the faculty members said:

"The most important advantage of distance education is that we can save time because many students who normally reside in dormitories no longer have to travel long distances to attend the campus . We can coordinate and hold classes at any time" (p5) "A remarkable advantage of e-learning is the chance peculiar to students employed in an organization . Many of our students who were employees during this period could benefit from e-learning and keep their jobs" (p7) .

Moreover, although the faculty members encountered several challenges faced by distance education during the COVID-19 pandemic, this crisis and the consequent abrupt alteration in the education system forced the teachers who were negligent of e-learning to turn to this type of education, and to some extent performs their tasks willingly. One of the teachers confirmed the positive impact of the compulsory experience of distance education: "Distance education had positive effects on us . That is , we would never be involved in distance education if the COVID-19 pandemic did not force us to carry out our tasks at home within the framework of e-learning . E-learning turned out to be highly beneficial . We learned how to use software" (p2) .

4.2. Facilitation of educational processes.

"If the COVID-19 crisis had not emerged , it might have taken ten years to reach this point , and we would have had to carry out a seven-year mission in four to five months . Thus , in this respect , the COVID-19 pandemic might have been beneficial in this respect" (p7) . "We had to learn how to use certain software , and I think it was a great chance for us" . (p4)

4.3. Cost reduction.

Faculty members’ experiences revealed that virtualization of education reduces the costs of holding workshops and conferences and provides students with accommodation and food. As one of the administrators mentioned in this regard: "University expenses have significantly decreased . No longer was any fund allocated to routine services such as transportation , dormitory maintenance , and cooking , as well as serving food for students due to the closure following the aggravation of the crisis . Only a few students were still in dormitories to pursue their internship" (p5) .

5. Trying to deal with the crisis

5.1. using social media as a learning tool..

Faculty members were unfamiliar with the university’s learning management system at the onset of the coronavirus crisis. Hence, they used social media messaging applications to continue their teaching task and prevent interruption. One educational administrator stated, "Due to the unpredictability of the continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic , it was first decided that the faculty members revise their PowerPoint files for a few sessions and send them to students via social media messaging applications or emails" (p1) .

5.2. Targeted empowerment of faculty members.

After familiarizing, teachers and students with the learning management system, several workshops and short-term courses were held to empower them. One of the teachers who were not competent in producing e-content said: "Although the preparation of standard educational content by faculty members was an educational challenge , the difficulties and problems of content preparation decreased following the participation of the faculty members in the training workshops held by the Education Development Center (EDC) of the university" (p5) .

5.3. Strategies for classroom management.

Faculty members used various tricks to improve their class management following the alleviation of the COVID-19 crisis. They emphasized dividing the students in crowded classes into two groups, giving two distinct types of tests, setting periods for homework, giving appropriate and case-based questions, and using new teaching methods such as an online flipped classroom.

"I tell the students that although the Navid LMS has a forum , Skyroom classes are live . Moreover , Skyroom provides us with a forum too . The cameras are connected within the framework of Skyroom , and we can see each other and share laptop screens" (p10) . "I tried to design the questions so that they would not cheat . I would give them cases so that only those who study the sources pass the exam . I gave exams with conceptual questions" (p14) .

5.4. Strategies for assessment management.

To have a realistic and authentic assessment, some faculty members asserted that learners’ assessment should not be limited to summative assessment. Furthermore, formative assessments and various assignments during the semester should be considered. "I think student assessment should be carried out primarily during the semester and with the assignments they are given" (p1) .

6. Beyond dealing with the crisis

According to the faculty members and administrators, this crisis was beneficial in preparing higher education institutions for future crises. The COVID-19 pandemic foregrounded the significance of e-learning in educational institutions.

6.1. Readiness to respond to future crises.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic imposed tremendous pressure on all aspects of society, including public health, specific potentials were gradually utilized to alleviate the coronavirus crisis. Consequently, the crisis was turned into appropriate educational opportunities. Several advantages can be attributed to the crisis management procedure during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pervasiveness of virtual education, the familiarity of teachers with various educational software, their capability to respond to future crises, and the development of specific strategies by the faculty members to guarantee the continuity of education by teachers are significant advantages. One of the teachers who were not familiar with educational software said: "Virtual education was good in this era because it introduced us to different software anyway" (p2) . "

6.2. Search and discover solutions to strengthen the continuity of virtual education.

Following the improvement in faculty members’ capabilities in e-learning, their readiness to respond to future corona-like crises was also improved. If similar problems arise and e-learning becomes necessary, they will no longer have the concerns of previous crises. They can be more prepared to deal with and manage it.

"The experience of e-learning during the COVID - 19 pandemic contributed to our readiness to respond to similar crises in the future . " (p7) . "I started an e-learning course to prepare myself for similar crises because I thought it would not be our last experience in the coming years , and other similar issues are likely to occur in the future . If crises like coronavirus arise , we will hold classes virtually " (P2) .

With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education suffered a great shock and, ultimately, an unexpected and unpredictable crisis worldwide, particularly in Iran. As a result, educational institutions were not ready to face this crisis, and the inevitable consequence was the emergence of education challenges.

In this study, the faculty members stated that they were initially unfamiliar with e-learning. This lack of familiarity and unpreparedness led to stress and mental confusion. Shenoy et al. (2020) and Aliyyah et al. (2020) reported similar instructors’ experiences in their studies. The instructors who participated in these studies stated that they also were exposed to mental confusion at the beginning of the virtualization of education. However, they reported their relative satisfaction over time [ 23 , 24 ].

On the other hand, the faculty members expressed concerns about the students’ learning disabilities and the challenges related to the practical course. This issue was reported in the study by Salmani (2021) in a category entitled Students’ superficial learning as a Challenge in E-learning in the COVID-19 Pandemic [ 25 ]. In another study, the low quality of virtual education compared to F2F teaching and students’ superficial learning have been dealt with [ 26 ].

Other challenges from instructors’ perspectives were raised consistent with previous studies. One of the primary challenges of e-learning based on the faculty members’ experiences was their resistance to e-learning. Some faculty members did not believe in the efficacy of e-learning, which was consistent with the findings of the study conducted by Mohi et al. (2020) [ 27 ]. One of the reasons for faculty members’ resistance to e-learning is that they are accustomed to traditional teaching. For years, they have preferred conventional teaching methods negligent of diversification or development of new methods of e-learning [ 28 ]. If the benefits of e-learning are emphasized, and faculty members become aware of this issue, as noted in the study by Mishra et al. (2021), they will be more motivated to teach [ 6 ].

The lack of high-speed internet bandwidth for preparing and uploading educational content led to faculty members’ dissatisfaction with this type of teaching. Moreover, the lack of standard infrastructure and suitable hardware and software equipment were among the challenges encountered by other faculty members in this period. Using personal equipment led to the depreciation and multiple repairs of these devices. Rezaei et al. conducted a study reporting the challenges encountered by faculty members (2020). They stated that most teachers’ cell phones were obsolete, and their laptops were primarily outdated [ 29 ]. The lack of suitable infrastructure was reported in many studies, particularly in developing countries [ 30 , 31 ]. Teachers called for the support of experienced staff and experts concerning educational technologies and e-content production. Consistent with the present study, Dawn (2019) has pointed out the significance of teachers’ familiarity with e-learning technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic [ 32 ]. Hence, the availability of a technical support team is essential for successfully developing an e-learning system and resolving the faculty members’ problems. Investing in human resources and their training is a significant issue for the development of e-learning [ 31 ].

An essential part of the data indicated challenges related to the suspension practical and laboratory courses. In their study, Sam et al. (2020) also mentioned suspending clinical education activities to reduce disease transmission and decrease patient hospitalization [ 32 ]. This issue is fundamental. Many students may miss the opportunity to acquire communication and technical skills due to reduced internship periods, academic and laboratory activities, and the lack of standard tools for practical courses. Onyema et al. (2020) also cite the limited access to physical and laboratory facilities as an adverse effect of e-learning [ 26 ].

According to many teachers, the reduction in interpersonal interactions, the lack of F2F interactions, and the consequent delay in providing the students with feedback caused the faculty members and students not to know each other’s abilities. In a similar study, the lack of proper communication between students and faculty members and their failure to provide their students with appropriate feedback was mentioned as teaching challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic [ 33 ]. According to De Oliveira et al. (2020), feedback difficulty in identifying students’ strengths and weaknesses is sometimes due to the lack of modern communication between teacher and student [ 34 ].

Another study referred to the lack of efficient interactions in virtual education as the main negative feature of this type of education [ 35 ]. Thus, interactions between teachers and students and timely feedback are central to the success of the educational process.

Student identification was one of the challenges stated by faculty members to be reported in the present study. Similarly, Agarwal MS et al. (2020) reported that many faculty members were uncertain about students’ presence in the virtual classroom. The lack of accurate authentication tools was an obstacle to ensuring students’ presence in virtual classrooms [ 36 ], which was consistent with the findings of this study. In the study by Lau et al. (2020), a defect in the evaluation of students by faculty members due to the lack of proper assessment tools was referred to as one of the most critical challenges of e-learning [ 37 ]. Other studies confirm that teachers can not guarantee that students are not cheating in electronic exams.

Moreover, it is impossible to ensure that the participant in the test is a student or someone else. Thus, the lack of proper assessment tools is one of the main problems of e-learning [ 28 ]. Virtualization of education also led to various kinds of abuse by some students and faculty members, consistent with the study by Agarwal et al. (2020) [ 36 ].

During this period, after overcoming the initial challenges of the COVID-19 crisis, the teachers’ experience in the field of virtual education and how to manage virtual classes increased, which led to the use of a variety of strategies for optimal classroom management and electronic assessment, including variation in teaching methods, keeping the class enjoyable to students, student participation in discussions, randomization of questions, and giving conceptual and challenging questions. These strategies contribute to motivation enhancement in students to participate in virtual classes [ 24 ]. Moreover, being satisfied with a single assessment method reduces the validity of the assessment, and it is essential to use multiple assessment methods instead of summative assessment [ 35 ].

One of the most critical points related to teachers’ experiences during this period was performing the teaching-learning task at home and blurring the boundaries between their personal and professional lives, which is consistent with Abedini et al. (2020) [ 38 ]. The home environment is not designed for academic activities. Hence, family members’ involvement at home causes overlapping roles and dissatisfaction. A similar study indicated that with the full-time presence of teachers at home, family members’ perceptions of the role of teachers changed. They expected teachers to perform the assigned functions alongside family members [ 39 ]. Teachers’ workload was increased according to teachers’ experiences, which was also confirmed in the study [ 40 , 41 ].

Despite the many disadvantages and challenges of virtual education, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, some advantages can be attributed to this educational approach, such as independence about time and place, reduced costs, the possibility of studying and working simultaneously and saving time. These advantages were reported in the study by Mukherjee et al. (2021) [ 39 ]. Alterations in the attitude of teachers toward e-learning and adaptation to it was one of the main advantages and the main factor facilitating the educational process during the COVID-19 pandemic. Taghizadeh et al. asserted that the crisis was a blessing for faculty members. The teachers who were not interested in e-learning became familiar with various educational software [ 37 ].

Furthermore, the experience gained by faculty members has enabled them to deal with similar crises in the future. Vershitskaya et al. (2020) showed that following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, faculty members maintained that e-learning should not be ignored when the COVID-19 crisis is over. Instead, they asserted that it should be used as a supplement to F2F education [ 41 ].

Managers’ attitudes were also considered in addition to the perspectives of faculty members in the present study, which could be considered a strength. However, the lack of students’ opinions concerning e-learning was one of the limitations of this study. The researchers who conducted the present study are teachers. Thus, their assumptions might have biased their interpretations of the data. Consequently, we tried to validate the data analysis by recognizing and ignoring the irrelevant assumptions. Also, Mixed methods studies are suggested to understand e-learning problems in the post-covid era better.

These findings suggest that teachers must become trained the most proficient in e-learning and technology-enhanced learning, and this capability should continue. Special attention should be paid to open educational platforms. The use of e-learning as a response to covid has been accepted and continued. The place of learning in educational institutions should be reviewed. Support infrastructures for instructors and students should be provided. Managers and educational leaders should be encouraged and guided toward adaptive educational design.

At the beginning of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, due to many reasons, including the resistance of teachers and learners to this approach and the lack of necessary infrastructure, the design and implementation of virtual education faced challenges. The teachers had many problems, such as weakness in class management, interference of roles, and even family restrictions. However, with time, the redoubled efforts of the teachers and the management of multiple roles by them, strengthening their knowledge in distance learning and e-content creation, and more participation in e-learning caused an increase in the quality of education. However, planning and foresight are needed in developing countries, including Iran, to appropriately face and optimally manage similar crises and move towards blended learning.

Acknowledgments

This research was conducted within the framework of an MSc thesis. We want to thank all the participants.

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• 10. Garland VE. From digital exclusion to digital inclusion for adult online learners. Advanced Methodologies and Technologies in Modern Education Delivery: IGI Global; 2019. p. 345–55.
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• Published: 25 January 2021

Online education in the post-COVID era

• Barbara B. Lockee 1  

Nature Electronics volume  4 ,  pages 5–6 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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• Science, technology and society

The coronavirus pandemic has forced students and educators across all levels of education to rapidly adapt to online learning. The impact of this — and the developments required to make it work — could permanently change how education is delivered.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the world to engage in the ubiquitous use of virtual learning. And while online and distance learning has been used before to maintain continuity in education, such as in the aftermath of earthquakes 1 , the scale of the current crisis is unprecedented. Speculation has now also begun about what the lasting effects of this will be and what education may look like in the post-COVID era. For some, an immediate retreat to the traditions of the physical classroom is required. But for others, the forced shift to online education is a moment of change and a time to reimagine how education could be delivered 2 .

Looking back

Online education has traditionally been viewed as an alternative pathway, one that is particularly well suited to adult learners seeking higher education opportunities. However, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has required educators and students across all levels of education to adapt quickly to virtual courses. (The term ‘emergency remote teaching’ was coined in the early stages of the pandemic to describe the temporary nature of this transition 3 .) In some cases, instruction shifted online, then returned to the physical classroom, and then shifted back online due to further surges in the rate of infection. In other cases, instruction was offered using a combination of remote delivery and face-to-face: that is, students can attend online or in person (referred to as the HyFlex model 4 ). In either case, instructors just had to figure out how to make it work, considering the affordances and constraints of the specific learning environment to create learning experiences that were feasible and effective.

The use of varied delivery modes does, in fact, have a long history in education. Mechanical (and then later electronic) teaching machines have provided individualized learning programmes since the 1950s and the work of B. F. Skinner 5 , who proposed using technology to walk individual learners through carefully designed sequences of instruction with immediate feedback indicating the accuracy of their response. Skinner’s notions formed the first formalized representations of programmed learning, or ‘designed’ learning experiences. Then, in the 1960s, Fred Keller developed a personalized system of instruction 6 , in which students first read assigned course materials on their own, followed by one-on-one assessment sessions with a tutor, gaining permission to move ahead only after demonstrating mastery of the instructional material. Occasional class meetings were held to discuss concepts, answer questions and provide opportunities for social interaction. A personalized system of instruction was designed on the premise that initial engagement with content could be done independently, then discussed and applied in the social context of a classroom.

These predecessors to contemporary online education leveraged key principles of instructional design — the systematic process of applying psychological principles of human learning to the creation of effective instructional solutions — to consider which methods (and their corresponding learning environments) would effectively engage students to attain the targeted learning outcomes. In other words, they considered what choices about the planning and implementation of the learning experience can lead to student success. Such early educational innovations laid the groundwork for contemporary virtual learning, which itself incorporates a variety of instructional approaches and combinations of delivery modes.

Online learning and the pandemic

Fast forward to 2020, and various further educational innovations have occurred to make the universal adoption of remote learning a possibility. One key challenge is access. Here, extensive problems remain, including the lack of Internet connectivity in some locations, especially rural ones, and the competing needs among family members for the use of home technology. However, creative solutions have emerged to provide students and families with the facilities and resources needed to engage in and successfully complete coursework 7 . For example, school buses have been used to provide mobile hotspots, and class packets have been sent by mail and instructional presentations aired on local public broadcasting stations. The year 2020 has also seen increased availability and adoption of electronic resources and activities that can now be integrated into online learning experiences. Synchronous online conferencing systems, such as Zoom and Google Meet, have allowed experts from anywhere in the world to join online classrooms 8 and have allowed presentations to be recorded for individual learners to watch at a time most convenient for them. Furthermore, the importance of hands-on, experiential learning has led to innovations such as virtual field trips and virtual labs 9 . A capacity to serve learners of all ages has thus now been effectively established, and the next generation of online education can move from an enterprise that largely serves adult learners and higher education to one that increasingly serves younger learners, in primary and secondary education and from ages 5 to 18.

The COVID-19 pandemic is also likely to have a lasting effect on lesson design. The constraints of the pandemic provided an opportunity for educators to consider new strategies to teach targeted concepts. Though rethinking of instructional approaches was forced and hurried, the experience has served as a rare chance to reconsider strategies that best facilitate learning within the affordances and constraints of the online context. In particular, greater variance in teaching and learning activities will continue to question the importance of ‘seat time’ as the standard on which educational credits are based 10 — lengthy Zoom sessions are seldom instructionally necessary and are not aligned with the psychological principles of how humans learn. Interaction is important for learning but forced interactions among students for the sake of interaction is neither motivating nor beneficial.

While the blurring of the lines between traditional and distance education has been noted for several decades 11 , the pandemic has quickly advanced the erasure of these boundaries. Less single mode, more multi-mode (and thus more educator choices) is becoming the norm due to enhanced infrastructure and developed skill sets that allow people to move across different delivery systems 12 . The well-established best practices of hybrid or blended teaching and learning 13 have served as a guide for new combinations of instructional delivery that have developed in response to the shift to virtual learning. The use of multiple delivery modes is likely to remain, and will be a feature employed with learners of all ages 14 , 15 . Future iterations of online education will no longer be bound to the traditions of single teaching modes, as educators can support pedagogical approaches from a menu of instructional delivery options, a mix that has been supported by previous generations of online educators 16 .

Also significant are the changes to how learning outcomes are determined in online settings. Many educators have altered the ways in which student achievement is measured, eliminating assignments and changing assessment strategies altogether 17 . Such alterations include determining learning through strategies that leverage the online delivery mode, such as interactive discussions, student-led teaching and the use of games to increase motivation and attention. Specific changes that are likely to continue include flexible or extended deadlines for assignment completion 18 , more student choice regarding measures of learning, and more authentic experiences that involve the meaningful application of newly learned skills and knowledge 19 , for example, team-based projects that involve multiple creative and social media tools in support of collaborative problem solving.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, technological and administrative systems for implementing online learning, and the infrastructure that supports its access and delivery, had to adapt quickly. While access remains a significant issue for many, extensive resources have been allocated and processes developed to connect learners with course activities and materials, to facilitate communication between instructors and students, and to manage the administration of online learning. Paths for greater access and opportunities to online education have now been forged, and there is a clear route for the next generation of adopters of online education.

Before the pandemic, the primary purpose of distance and online education was providing access to instruction for those otherwise unable to participate in a traditional, place-based academic programme. As its purpose has shifted to supporting continuity of instruction, its audience, as well as the wider learning ecosystem, has changed. It will be interesting to see which aspects of emergency remote teaching remain in the next generation of education, when the threat of COVID-19 is no longer a factor. But online education will undoubtedly find new audiences. And the flexibility and learning possibilities that have emerged from necessity are likely to shift the expectations of students and educators, diminishing further the line between classroom-based instruction and virtual learning.

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What the Covid-19 Pandemic Revealed About Remote School

The unplanned experiment provided clear lessons on the value—and limitations—of online learning. Are educators listening?

Katherine Reynolds Lewis, Undark Magazine

The transition to online learning in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic was, by many accounts, a failure. While there were some  bright   spots  across the country, the transition was messy and uneven — countless teachers had neither the materials nor training they needed to effectively connect with students remotely, while many of those students   were bored , isolated, and lacked the resources they needed to learn. The results were abysmal: low test scores, fewer children learning at grade level, increased inequity, and teacher burnout. With the public health crisis on top of deaths and job losses in many families, students experienced   increases  in depression, anxiety, and suicide risk.

Yet society very well may face new widespread calamities in the near future, from another pandemic to extreme weather, that will require a similarly quick shift to remote school. Success will hinge on big changes, from infrastructure to teacher training, several experts told Undark. “We absolutely need to invest in ways for schools to run continuously, to pick up where they left off. But man, it’s a tall order,” said Heather L. Schwartz, a senior policy researcher at RAND. “It’s not good enough for teachers to simply refer students to disconnected, stand-alone videos on, say, YouTube. Students need lessons that connect directly to what they were learning before school closed.”

More than three years after U.S. schools shifted to remote instruction on an emergency basis, the education sector is still largely unprepared for another long-term interruption of in-person school. The stakes are highest for those who need it most: low-income children and students of color, who are also most likely to be harmed in a future pandemic or live in communities  most affected  by climate change. But, given the abundance of research on what didn’t work during the pandemic, school leaders may have the opportunity to do things differently next time. Being ready would require strategic planning, rethinking the role of the teacher, and using new technology wisely, experts told Undark. And many problems with remote learning actually trace back not to technology, but to basic instructional quality. Effective remote learning won’t happen if schools aren’t already employing best practices in the physical classroom, such as creating a culture of learning from mistakes, empowering teachers to meet individual student needs, establishing high expectations, and setting clear goals supported by frequent feedback. While it’s ambitious to envision that every school district will create seamless virtual learning platforms — and, for that matter, overcome challenges in education more broadly — the lessons of the pandemic are there to be followed or ignored.

“We haven’t done anywhere near the amount of planning or the development of the instructional infrastructure needed to allow for a smooth transition next time schools need to close for prolonged periods of time,” Schwartz said. “Until we can reach that goal, I don’t have high confidence that the next prolonged school closure will be substantially more successful.”

Before the pandemic,  only 3 percent  of U.S. school districts offered virtual school, mostly for students with unique circumstances, such as a disability or those intensely pursuing a sport or the performing arts, according to a RAND  survey  Schwartz co-authored. For the most part, the educational technology companies and developers creating software for these schools promised to give students a personalized experience. But the research on these programs, which focused on virtual charter schools that only existed online, showed  poor outcomes . Their students were a year behind in math and nearly a half-year behind in reading, and courses offered less direct time with a teacher each week than regular schools have in a day.

The pandemic sparked growth in stand-alone virtual academies, in addition to the emergency remote learning that districts had to adopt in March 2020. Educators’ interest in online instructional materials exploded, too, according to Schwartz, “and it really put the foot on the gas to ramp them up, expand them, and in theory, improve them.” By June 2021, the number of school districts with a stand-alone virtual school rose to 26 percent. Of the remaining districts, another 23 percent were interested in offering an online school, the report found.

But the sheer magnitude of options for online learning didn’t necessarily mean it worked well, Schwartz said: “It’s the quality part that has to come up in order for this to be a really good, viable alternative to in person instruction.” And individualized, self-directed online learning proved to be a pipe dream — especially for younger children who needed support from a parent or other family member even to get online, much less stay focused.

“The notion that students would have personalized playlists and could curate their own education was proven to be problematic on a couple levels, especially for younger and less affluent students,” said Thomas Toch, director of FutureEd, an education think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. “The social and emotional toll that isolation and those traumas took on students suggest that the social dimension of schooling is hugely important and was greatly undervalued, especially by proponents for an increased role of technology.”

Students also often didn’t have the materials they needed for online school, some lacking computers or internet access at home. Teachers didn’t have the right training for  online instruction , which has a unique pedagogy and best practices. As a result, many virtual classrooms attempted to replicate the same lessons over video that would’ve been delivered at school. The results were overwhelmingly bad, research shows. ​​For example, a  2022 study  found six consistent themes about how the pandemic affected learning, including a lack of interaction between students and with teachers, and disproportionate harm to low-income students. Numb from isolation and too many hours in front of a screen, students  failed to engage  in coursework and  suffered emotionally .

After some districts resumed in-person or hybrid instruction in the 2020 fall semester, it became clear that the longer students were remote,  the worse their learning delays . For example, national standardized test scores for the 2020-2021 school year showed that passing rates for math declined about 14 percentage points on average, more than three times the drop seen in districts that returned to in-person instruction the earliest, according to a  2021 National Bureau of Economic Research study . Even after most U.S. districts resumed in-person instruction, students who had been online the longest  continued to lag  behind their peers. The pandemic  hit cities hardest  and the effects disproportionately harmed low-income children and students of color in urban areas.

“What we did during the pandemic is not the optimal use of online learning in education for the future,” said Ashley Jochim, a researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. “Online learning is not a full stop substitute for what kids need to thrive and be supported at school.”

Children also largely prefer in-person school. A  2022 Pew Research Center survey  suggested that 65 percent of students would rather be in a classroom, 9 percent would opt for online only, and the rest are unsure or prefer a hybrid model. “For most families and kids, full-time online school is actually not the educational solution they want,” Jochim said.

Virtual school felt meaningless to Abner Magdaleno, a 12th grader in Los Angeles. “I couldn’t really connect with it, because I’m more of, like, a social person. And that was stripped away from me when we went online,” recalled Magdaleno. Mackenzie Sheehy, 19, of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, found there were too many distractions at home to learn. Her grades suffered, and she missed the one-on-one time with teachers. (Sheehy graduated from high school in 2022.)

Many teachers feel the same way. “Nothing replaces physical proximity, whatever the age,” said Ana Silva, a New York City English teacher. She enjoyed experimenting with interactive technology during online school, but is grateful to be back in person. “I like the casual way kids can come to my desk and see me. I like the dynamism — seeing kids in the cafeteria. Those interactions are really positive, and they were entirely missing during the online learning.”

During the 2022-2023 school year, many districts  initially planned  to continue online courses for snow days and other building closures. But they found that the teacher instruction, student experience, and demands on families were simply too different for in-person versus remote school, said Liz Kolb, an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Michigan. “Schools are moving away from that because it’s too difficult to quickly transition and blend back and forth among the two without having strong structures in place,” Kolb said. “Most schools don’t have those strong structures.”

In addition, both families and educators grew sick of their screens. “They’re trying to avoid technology a little bit. There’s this fatigue coming out of remote learning and the pandemic,” said Mingyu Feng, a research director at WestEd, a nonprofit research agency. “If the students are on Zoom every day for like, six hours, that seems to be not quite right.”

Despite the bumpy pandemic rollout, online school can serve an important role in the U.S. education system. For one, online learning is a better alternative for some students. Garvey Mortley, 15, of Bethesda, Maryland, and her two sisters all switched to their district’s virtual academy during the pandemic to protect their own health and their grandmother’s. This year, Mortley’s sisters went back to in-person school, but she chose to stay online. “I love the flexibility about it,” she said, noting that some of her classmates prefer it because they have a disability or have demanding schedules. “I love how I can just roll out of bed in the morning, and I can sit down and do school.” Some educators also prefer teaching online, according to  reports  of virtual schools that were inundated with applications from teachers because they wanted to keep  working from home . Silva, the New York high school English teacher, enjoys online tutoring and academic coaching, because it facilitates one-on-one interaction.

And in rural districts and those with low enrollment, some access to online learning ensures students can take courses that could otherwise be inaccessible. “Because of the economies of scale in small rural districts, they needed to tap into online and shared service delivery arrangements in order to provide a full complement of coursework at the high school level,” said Jochim. Innovation in these districts, she added, will accelerate: “We’ll continue to see growth, scalability, and improvement in quality.”

There were also some schools that were largely successful at switching to online at the start of the pandemic, such as Vista Unified School District in California, which  pooled and shared innovative ideas  for adapting in March 2020; the school quickly put together an online portal so that principals and teachers could share ideas and the district could allot the necessary resources. Digging into examples like this could point the way to the future of online learning, said Chelsea Waite, a senior researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, who was part of a collaborative project studying 70 schools and districts that pivoted successfully to online learning. The  project found  three factors that made the transition work: a focus on resilience, collaboration, and autonomy for both students and educators; a healthy culture that prioritized relationships; and strong yet flexible systems that were accustomed to adaptation.

“We investigated schools that did seem to be more prepared for the Covid disruption, not just with having devices in students’ hands or having an online curriculum already, but with a learning culture in the school that really prioritized agency and problem solving as skills for students and adults,” Waite said. “In these schools, kids are learning from a very young age to be a little bit more self-directed, to set goals, and pursue them and pivot when they need to.”

Similarly, many of the takeaways from the pandemic trace back to the basics of effective education, not technological innovation. A landmark report by the National Academies of Sciences called “How People Learn,” most recently updated in 2018, synthesized the body of educational research and identified four key features in the most successful learning environments. First, these schools are designed for, and adapt to, the specific students, building on what they bring to the classroom, such as skills and beliefs. Second, successful schools give their students clear goals, showing them what they need to learn and how they can get there. Third, they provide in-the-moment feedback that emphasizes understanding, not memorization. And finally, the most successful schools are community-centered, with a culture of collaboration and acceptance of mistakes.

“We as humans are social learners, yet some of the tech talk is driven by people who are strong individual learners,” said Jeremy Roschelle, executive director of Learning Sciences Research at Digital Promise, a global education nonprofit. “They’re not necessarily thinking about how most people learn, which is very social.”

Another powerful insight from pandemic-era remote schooling involves the evolving role of teachers, said Kim Kelly, a middle school math teacher at Northbridge Middle School in Massachusetts and a K-8 curriculum coach. Historically, a teacher’s role is the keeper of knowledge who delivers instruction. But in recent years, there has been a shift in approach, where teachers think of themselves as coaches who can intervene based on a student’s individual learning progress. Technology that assists with a coach-like role can be effective — but requires educators to be trained and comfortable interpreting data on student needs.

For example, with a digital learning platform called ASSISTments, teachers can assign math problems, students complete them — potentially receiving in-the-moment feedback on steps they’re getting wrong — and then the teachers can use data from individual students and the entire class to plan instruction and see where additional support is needed.

“A big advantage of these computer-driven products is they really try to diagnose where students are, and try to address their needs. It’s very personalized, individualized,” said WestEd’s Feng, who has  evaluated  ASSISTments and other educational technologies. She noted that some teachers feel frustrated “when you expect them to read the data and try to figure out what the students’ needs are.”

Teacher’s colleges don’t typically prepare educators to interpret data and change their practices, said Kelly, whose dissertation focused on self-regulated online learning. But professional development has helped her learn to harness technology to improve teaching and learning. “Schools are in data overload; we are oozing data from every direction, yet none of it is very actionable,” she said. Some technology, she added, provided student data that she could use regularly, which changed how she taught and assigned homework.

When students get feedback from the computer program during a homework session, the whole class doesn’t have to review the homework together, which can save time. Educators can move forward on instruction — or if they see areas of confusion, focus more on those topics. The ability of the programs to detect how well students are learning “is unreal,” said Kelly, “but it really does require teachers to be monitoring that data and interpreting.” She learned to accept that some students could drive their own learning and act on the feedback from homework, while others simply needed more teacher intervention. She now does more assessment at the beginning of a course to better support all students.

At the district or even national level, letting teachers play to their strengths can also help improve how their students learn, Toch, of FutureEd, said. For example, if a teacher is better at delivering instruction, they could give a lesson to a larger group of students online, while another teacher who is more comfortable in the coach role could work in smaller groups or one-on-one.

“One thing we saw during the pandemic are smart strategies for using technology to get outstanding teachers in front of more students,” Toch said, describing one effort that recruited exceptional teachers nationally and built a strong curriculum to be delivered online. “The local educators were providing support for their students in their classrooms.”

Remote schooling requires new technology, and already, educators are swamped with competing platforms and software choices — most of which have  insufficient evidence of efficacy . Traditional independent research on specific technologies is sparse, Roschelle said. Post-pandemic, the field is so diverse and there are so many technologies in use, it’s almost impossible to find a control group to design a randomized control trial, he added. However, there is qualitative research and evidence that give hints about the quality of technology and online learning, such as  case studies  and school recommendations.

Educational leaders should ask three key questions about technology before investing, recommended Ryan Baker, a professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania: Is there evidence it works to improve learning outcomes? Does the vendor provide support and training, or are teachers on their own? And does it work with the same types of students as are in their school or district? In other words, educators must look at a technology’s track record in the context of their own school’s demographics, geography, culture, and challenges. These decisions are complicated by the small universe of researchers and evaluators, who have many overlapping relationships. (Over his career, for example, Baker has worked with or consulted for many of the education technology firms that create the software he studies.)

It may help to broaden the definition of evidence. The Center on Reinventing Public Education launched the  Canopy project  to collect examples of effective educational innovation around the U.S.

“What we wanted to do is build much better and more open and collective knowledge about where schools are challenging old assumptions and redesigning what school is and should be,” she added, noting that these educational leaders are reconceptualizing the skills they want students to attain. “They’re often trying to measure or communicate concepts that we don’t have great measurement tools for yet. So they end up relying on a lot of testimonials and evidence of student work.”

The moment is ripe for innovation in online and in-person education, said Julia Fallon, executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, since the pandemic accelerated the rollout of devices and needed infrastructure. There’s an  opportunity  and need for technology that empowers teachers to improve learning outcomes and work more efficiently, said Roschelle. Online and hybrid learning are clearly here to stay — and likely will be called upon again during future temporary school closures.

Still, poorly-executed remote learning risks tainting the whole model; parents and students may be unlikely to give it a second chance. The pandemic showed the hard and fast limits on the potential for fully remote learning to be adopted broadly, for one, because in many communities, schools serve more than an educational function — they support children’s mental health, social needs, and nutrition and other physical health needs. The pandemic also highlighted the real challenge in training the entire U.S. teaching corps to be proficient in technology and data analysis. And the lack of a nimble shift to remote learning in an emergency will disproportionately harm low-income children and students of color. So the stakes are high for getting it right, experts told Undark, and summoning the political will.

“There are these benefits in online education, but there are also these real weaknesses we know from prior research and experience,” Jochim said. “So how do we build a system that has online learning as a complement to this other set of supports and experiences that kids benefit from?”

Katherine Reynolds Lewis is an award-winning journalist covering children, race, gender, disability, mental health, social justice, and science.

This article was originally published on Undark . Read the original article .

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Home learning experiences through the COVID-19 pandemic

• Sarah Cattan
• Christine Farquharson
• Sonya Krutikova

Angus Phimister

Adam Salisbury

Almudena Sevilla

Published on 6 September 2021

In this report, we examine how the learning experiences of English school children evolved over the course of the first 12 months of disruption, from the beginning of the first lockdown in March 2020 until the end of the second period of school closures in March 2021.

• Education and skills

R195-Home-learning-experiences-through-the-COVID-19-pandemic.pdf 

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The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a monumental blow to the education of English school children. Over the past 18 months, English school pupils experienced two long periods of nationwide school closures. The first round of universal school closures lasted 10 weeks (from 23 March to 1 June 2020); some pupils were not able to return to school until the start of September that year. This unprecedented action was repeated at the start of 2021, with pupils across England sent home for 9 weeks (from 5 January to 8 March 2021). Even when schools were open outside these periods, in-school provision was hampered by social distancing protocols, staff shortages and self-isolation.

There is growing evidence that disruption during the pandemic has undermined children’s education and increased inequalities between those from disadvantaged backgrounds and their better-off peers. So far, most of the evidence focuses on the initial period of school closures in Spring 2020. But as teachers and pupils start a new academic year, understanding how children’s experiences changed over the course of the pandemic – and how these experiences differed for those from different backgrounds – will be an important step in assessing the extent of learning loss, and what can be done to help pupils to catch up.

Learning throughout the pandemic

In this report, we therefore examine how the learning experiences of English school children evolved over the course of the first 12 months of disruption, from the beginning of the first lockdown in March 2020 until the end of the second period of school closures in March 2021. We consider learning experiences during both periods of nationwide school closures as well as during the 2020 autumn term – when schools were open but periodically disrupted. Specifically, we look at how learning time changed between the closures, the extent of self-isolation during the autumn, and the nature of school remote learning provisions throughout. We also examine how inequalities between richer and poorer pupils evolved over the course of the pandemic, and what this implies about catch-up policies in the future.

To do this, we use data from two online surveys that were administered to parents of English school children during the two phases of closure. This gives us real-time insights into how parents and pupils coped during these periods of unprecedented disruption. In the second survey, we also asked recall questions about the 2020 autumn term, to get a sense of how schools and families coped when schools were open but disrupted – a model that has since characterised the 2021 spring and summer terms as well.

Understanding how learning experiences changed in the 12 months since the first round of school closures gives an important indication of the extent to which parents, pupils and schools adapted as the pandemic progressed. The findings of this report can help shape policies aimed at helping students ‘catch up’ as schools return to more familiar modes of education delivery, as well as ensuring appropriate access to education in a likely future of continued disruption because of self-isolation.

Key findings

• Home learning in early 2021 was more successful than during the first period of school closures. Among out-of-school pupils, learning time rose from 22 hours a week in April/May 2020 to 26 hours a week in February/March 2021 for primary pupils (22 to 29 hours a week for secondary pupils). The quality of learning time also improved. Schools were far more likely to offer active learning resources; while 40% of children were offered online classes during the first round of school closures, this rose to 67% by February/March 2021. Children were more likely to have access to tablets and laptops, and parents reported finding it easier to support home schooling.
• However, even in the second round of school closures, home learning still fell below policymakers’ expectations. In early 2021, the Department for Education introduced guidelines for the minimum daily amount of time children should spend on remote learning. However, around 40% of pupils did not meet the suggested amount of time during the second period of school closures.
• Even when national school closures were lifted, learning time continued to be disrupted, largely due to extensive self-isolation. On average, children in our survey lost out on 8 days of in-school instruction during the 2020 autumn term because they needed to self-isolate (compared with less than 3 days of absence per term in pre-pandemic times). When they were isolating, most children had limited resources to continue to learn at home: just 40% of pupils had access to interactive learning resources when asked to self-isolate during the 2020 autumn term. This is a substantial fall from the 55% of pupils who had been offered such resources during national school closures the previous term.
• Inequalities in remote learning time between richer and poorer children improved between the two rounds of school closure, with little if any gap in learning time during early 2021. This was driven by an improvement in home learning experiences for poorer children, with substantially improved access to online learning resources (and to the technology needed to access them). Expanded access to in-person schooling also meant that some children who struggled with remote learning had the option to attend school in person.
• However, during the autumn term, poorer pupils spent longer in self-isolation, and had less access to school provisions when doing so. This suggests that inequalities may have worsened outside of the periods of school closure – including since March 2021.
• Targeted interventions are probably essential to closing educational inequalities. During the second round of school closures, inequalities in home learning experiences started to close, so disadvantaged students had a more similar experience to their better-off peers. However, on their own, similar experiences going forward are unlikely to be enough to offset the educational gaps that opened up during the first period of school closures.
• Catch-up policies need to be carefully designed to meet the scale of the challenge, as well as targeting the pupils most in need. After a year of COVID-related disruption to education, 25% of parents think their child will take at least a school year to catch up on lost learning; 7% think that their child will never catch up. While most parents support tutoring, parents of richer pupils are more likely to have taken up the offer of catch-up tuition. Catch-up policies need to be carefully designed and incorporated into the school day where possible, to ensure that they are accessed by the pupils who stand to benefit the most.

Research Fellow

Sarah is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Deputy Research Director

Sonya Krutikova is an Associate Professor of Economics at Manchester University and IFS Deputy Research Director.

Associate Director

Christine's research examines inequalities in children's education and health, especially in the early education and childcare sector.

Report details

Suggested citation.

Cattan, S et al. (2021). Home learning experiences through the COVID-19 pandemic . London: The IFS. Available at: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/home-learning-experiences-through-covid-19-pandemic (accessed: 19 June 2024).

Press release

Inequalities in home learning experiences improved over the pandemic – but targeted interventions will be essential to closing the gaps that the first lockdown widened, more from ifs, understand this issue.

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The pandemic has had devastating impacts on learning. What will it take to help students catch up?

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, megan kuhfeld , megan kuhfeld senior research scientist - nwea @megankuhfeld jim soland , jim soland assistant professor, school of education and human development - university of virginia, affiliated research fellow - nwea @jsoland karyn lewis , and karyn lewis director, center for school and student progress - nwea @karynlew emily morton emily morton research scientist - nwea @emily_r_morton.

March 3, 2022

As we reach the two-year mark of the initial wave of pandemic-induced school shutdowns, academic normalcy remains out of reach for many students, educators, and parents. In addition to surging COVID-19 cases at the end of 2021, schools have faced severe staff shortages , high rates of absenteeism and quarantines , and rolling school closures . Furthermore, students and educators continue to struggle with mental health challenges , higher rates of violence and misbehavior , and concerns about lost instructional time .

As we outline in our new research study released in January, the cumulative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on students’ academic achievement has been large. We tracked changes in math and reading test scores across the first two years of the pandemic using data from 5.4 million U.S. students in grades 3-8. We focused on test scores from immediately before the pandemic (fall 2019), following the initial onset (fall 2020), and more than one year into pandemic disruptions (fall 2021).

Average fall 2021 math test scores in grades 3-8 were 0.20-0.27 standard deviations (SDs) lower relative to same-grade peers in fall 2019, while reading test scores were 0.09-0.18 SDs lower. This is a sizable drop. For context, the math drops are significantly larger than estimated impacts from other large-scale school disruptions, such as after Hurricane Katrina—math scores dropped 0.17 SDs in one year for New Orleans evacuees .

Even more concerning, test-score gaps between students in low-poverty and high-poverty elementary schools grew by approximately 20% in math (corresponding to 0.20 SDs) and 15% in reading (0.13 SDs), primarily during the 2020-21 school year. Further, achievement tended to drop more between fall 2020 and 2021 than between fall 2019 and 2020 (both overall and differentially by school poverty), indicating that disruptions to learning have continued to negatively impact students well past the initial hits following the spring 2020 school closures.

These numbers are alarming and potentially demoralizing, especially given the heroic efforts of students to learn and educators to teach in incredibly trying times. From our perspective, these test-score drops in no way indicate that these students represent a “ lost generation ” or that we should give up hope. Most of us have never lived through a pandemic, and there is so much we don’t know about students’ capacity for resiliency in these circumstances and what a timeline for recovery will look like. Nor are we suggesting that teachers are somehow at fault given the achievement drops that occurred between 2020 and 2021; rather, educators had difficult jobs before the pandemic, and now are contending with huge new challenges, many outside their control.

Clearly, however, there’s work to do. School districts and states are currently making important decisions about which interventions and strategies to implement to mitigate the learning declines during the last two years. Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) investments from the American Rescue Plan provided nearly $200 billion to public schools to spend on COVID-19-related needs. Of that sum, $22 billion is dedicated specifically to addressing learning loss using “evidence-based interventions” focused on the “ disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on underrepresented student subgroups. ” Reviews of district and state spending plans (see Future Ed , EduRecoveryHub , and RAND’s American School District Panel for more details) indicate that districts are spending their ESSER dollars designated for academic recovery on a wide variety of strategies, with summer learning, tutoring, after-school programs, and extended school-day and school-year initiatives rising to the top.

Comparing the negative impacts from learning disruptions to the positive impacts from interventions

To help contextualize the magnitude of the impacts of COVID-19, we situate test-score drops during the pandemic relative to the test-score gains associated with common interventions being employed by districts as part of pandemic recovery efforts. If we assume that such interventions will continue to be as successful in a COVID-19 school environment, can we expect that these strategies will be effective enough to help students catch up? To answer this question, we draw from recent reviews of research on high-dosage tutoring , summer learning programs , reductions in class size , and extending the school day (specifically for literacy instruction) . We report effect sizes for each intervention specific to a grade span and subject wherever possible (e.g., tutoring has been found to have larger effects in elementary math than in reading).

Figure 1 shows the standardized drops in math test scores between students testing in fall 2019 and fall 2021 (separately by elementary and middle school grades) relative to the average effect size of various educational interventions. The average effect size for math tutoring matches or exceeds the average COVID-19 score drop in math. Research on tutoring indicates that it often works best in younger grades, and when provided by a teacher rather than, say, a parent. Further, some of the tutoring programs that produce the biggest effects can be quite intensive (and likely expensive), including having full-time tutors supporting all students (not just those needing remediation) in one-on-one settings during the school day. Meanwhile, the average effect of reducing class size is negative but not significant, with high variability in the impact across different studies. Summer programs in math have been found to be effective (average effect size of .10 SDs), though these programs in isolation likely would not eliminate the COVID-19 test-score drops.

Figure 1: Math COVID-19 test-score drops compared to the effect sizes of various educational interventions

Source: COVID-19 score drops are pulled from Kuhfeld et al. (2022) Table 5; reduction-in-class-size results are from pg. 10 of Figles et al. (2018) Table 2; summer program results are pulled from Lynch et al (2021) Table 2; and tutoring estimates are pulled from Nictow et al (2020) Table 3B. Ninety-five percent confidence intervals are shown with vertical lines on each bar.

Notes: Kuhfeld et al. and Nictow et al. reported effect sizes separately by grade span; Figles et al. and Lynch et al. report an overall effect size across elementary and middle grades. We were unable to find a rigorous study that reported effect sizes for extending the school day/year on math performance. Nictow et al. and Kraft & Falken (2021) also note large variations in tutoring effects depending on the type of tutor, with larger effects for teacher and paraprofessional tutoring programs than for nonprofessional and parent tutoring. Class-size reductions included in the Figles meta-analysis ranged from a minimum of one to minimum of eight students per class.

Figure 2 displays a similar comparison using effect sizes from reading interventions. The average effect of tutoring programs on reading achievement is larger than the effects found for the other interventions, though summer reading programs and class size reduction both produced average effect sizes in the ballpark of the COVID-19 reading score drops.

Figure 2: Reading COVID-19 test-score drops compared to the effect sizes of various educational interventions

Source: COVID-19 score drops are pulled from Kuhfeld et al. (2022) Table 5; extended-school-day results are from Figlio et al. (2018) Table 2; reduction-in-class-size results are from pg. 10 of Figles et al. (2018) ; summer program results are pulled from Kim & Quinn (2013) Table 3; and tutoring estimates are pulled from Nictow et al (2020) Table 3B. Ninety-five percent confidence intervals are shown with vertical lines on each bar.

Notes: While Kuhfeld et al. and Nictow et al. reported effect sizes separately by grade span, Figlio et al. and Kim & Quinn report an overall effect size across elementary and middle grades. Class-size reductions included in the Figles meta-analysis ranged from a minimum of one to minimum of eight students per class.

There are some limitations of drawing on research conducted prior to the pandemic to understand our ability to address the COVID-19 test-score drops. First, these studies were conducted under conditions that are very different from what schools currently face, and it is an open question whether the effectiveness of these interventions during the pandemic will be as consistent as they were before the pandemic. Second, we have little evidence and guidance about the efficacy of these interventions at the unprecedented scale that they are now being considered. For example, many school districts are expanding summer learning programs, but school districts have struggled to find staff interested in teaching summer school to meet the increased demand. Finally, given the widening test-score gaps between low- and high-poverty schools, it’s uncertain whether these interventions can actually combat the range of new challenges educators are facing in order to narrow these gaps. That is, students could catch up overall, yet the pandemic might still have lasting, negative effects on educational equality in this country.

Given that the current initiatives are unlikely to be implemented consistently across (and sometimes within) districts, timely feedback on the effects of initiatives and any needed adjustments will be crucial to districts’ success. The Road to COVID Recovery project and the National Student Support Accelerator are two such large-scale evaluation studies that aim to produce this type of evidence while providing resources for districts to track and evaluate their own programming. Additionally, a growing number of resources have been produced with recommendations on how to best implement recovery programs, including scaling up tutoring , summer learning programs , and expanded learning time .

Ultimately, there is much work to be done, and the challenges for students, educators, and parents are considerable. But this may be a moment when decades of educational reform, intervention, and research pay off. Relying on what we have learned could show the way forward.

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The challenges of home learning during the covid-19 pandemic, after their schools closed due to the pandemic, moreyna and joaquin are striving to study effectively from home..

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At 7 A.M. one morning, Moreyna woke up with renewed enthusiasm. As she did every school day prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, she showered, had her breakfast, and put on her school uniform. She then asked her mother to take her to school in the hope that “everything had gone back to normal.”

But she learned soon enough that her school was still closed. She became morose.

“I don’t like it because I can’t see my friends and teachers,” she moaned.

It was then that Moreyna’s mother, Maria Morin, realized that her daughter needed all the help she could get. “I decided to help her study more often,” she said. “It was the only way to make this new reality more bearable for my daughter.”

The pandemic’s profound impact on education

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, Moreyna’s school was closed by the local government. Moreyna was one of the 62.5 million students across the country—from pre-primary to higher education—who had had no choice but to learn from home.

This unprecedented shift to home learning has had a profound impact on students, parents and teachers across Indonesia. It has also exposed the vast geographic and socio-economic inequalities across the nation, with students from poor backgrounds and students with disabilities most impacted.

UNICEF’s support for the government

Since the start of the pandemic, the Government of Indonesia has taken some timely steps to support learning from home. Among them was adapting e-learning applications of both the Ministry of Education and Culture* (MoE) and the Ministry of Religious Affairs and training teachers to use online learning platforms.

However, the biggest obstacle for students learning from home, especially those who are poor and live in remote areas, is lack of internet access and electronic devices. According to UNICEF Education Specialist Nugroho Warman, “Parents also have to focus on other obligations to support their family, which leaves them with less time to support their children.”

In response, the MoE launched an educational TV programme called Belajar dari Rumah (Learning from Home) aimed at children without access internet but with access to TV.** The programme, which covers pre-school and high school, runs from Monday to Friday and is broadcasted through the State Television Network TVRI. It also includes additional programmes for parents.

To help assess the effectiveness of Belajar dari Rumah , UNICEF has been conducting regular surveys among parents, teachers and children. The surveys are conducted through SMS to be able to reach areas with no internet access.

UNICEF is also assisting the MoE in developing offline learning materials and establishing guidelines for responding to COVID-19 at the provincial and district levels.

Challenges ahead

To further mitigate the effects of the pandemic, the government has entered into various strategic partnerships: among them with EdTech companies to provide free access to online learning platforms, and with telecommunications operations on free internet quotas for teachers and students.

Despite these efforts, however, the structural disparity remains. For many disadvantaged families, the gap is even widening. Some remote areas do not even have electricity, and assisting children with online learning has proven challenging to many parents, especially those of a certain age and educational level.

In some poor villages, children are not even learning from home because the economic tolls of the pandemic have forced their farmer parents to enlist their help in the fields.

To help address this imbalance, UNICEF seeks to continue its partnership with the government by developing and scaling-up programmes aimed at meeting the educational needs of children in remote areas. With your funding and support , these programmes can be rolled out and distributed more quickly and equitably.

It’s far from ideal, but it’s working

For relatively more fortunate children like Moreyna and Joaquin, 8, things are starting to look up.

Maria is certainly aware of the positive shift in her daughter’s behaviour. “Moreyna is much happier studying from home, now that I am regularly by her side,” she says, adding that soon her daughter will attend primary school.

Moreyna is also much more active around the house. Apart from baking, she and her brother have taken up a new hobby—dancing.

After a few months of home learning, Joaquin, 8, is also happier and more confident. “I can still connect with my teachers while studying at home,” he says. “If I have difficulties with my school assignments, I can reach out to them and ask for help.”

How You Can Help

Thanks to the generous contributions of individual donors, UNICEF has been able to work with schools, madrasas, teachers and government officials in the education and religious affairs sectors across Indonesia to help children like Moreyna and Joaquin learn effectively from home.

However, assuming most schools remain closed due to rising COVID-19 cases, not only will parents’ ability to help their children study from home be stretched, but children will also lose, on average, about a third of a year of learning. This loss will affect their capacity to earn in the future.

Given the existing geographical and socio-economic inequalities, scaling-up this support across the provinces requires resources and a sustained effort. For this we need your support.

If you want to help minimize the tolls the COVID-19 pandemic has on our children’s future and make sure they can reach their dreams, please consider donating to UNICEF . We very much appreciate your contribution.

* Now the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology.

** According to recent World Bank data, 95% of households in Indonesia own television sets.

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Learning in times of COVID-19: Students’, Families’, and Educators’ Perspectives

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Digging deeper on the pandemic learning loss

Editor’s note:  On May 11, 2023, the researchers released data for an additional 12 states that were unavailable when this story was published, as well as findings on the influence of additional community factors. The implications of the  new findings  were explored in  an op-ed  in the  New York Times .

On the heels of new evidence of a nationwide decline in student achievement during the pandemic, a team of researchers at Stanford and Harvard released a detailed analysis that brings the findings closer to home.

The Education Recovery Scorecard , published Oct. 28 by researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) and the Center for Education Policy and Research (CEPR) at Harvard, combines local and national test score data to map changes in student performance over the past three years within individual school districts.

Their analysis is the first clear picture of pandemic learning loss at the school district level, revealing differences in the pandemic’s impact across U.S. communities.

Test scores released earlier in the week from the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) – widely known as the nation’s report card – showed, on average, a drop in math and reading scores between 2019 and 2022. But the analysis by Stanford and Harvard researchers shows how the losses varied from one school district to the next.

“In some school districts, students fell behind by as much as a grade level or more. In other school districts, the difference between the 2019 and 2022 test scores was essentially zero,” said Sean Reardon , the Professor in Poverty and Inequality at the GSE and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), who led the data analysis behind the Education Recovery Scorecard. “There was enormous variability in the pandemic’s impact on kids’ academic performance.”

In addition to creating interactive maps detailing the variability among districts, the researchers identified patterns in the relationship between student performance and the extent of remote learning in each district, as well as trends among racial and economic groups.

The Education Recovery Scorecard also provides a forecast of the likely long-term implications for students and research on interventions that school districts could undertake to help students catch up.

“The pandemic was like a band of tornadoes that swept across the country. Some communities were left relatively untouched, while neighboring schools were devastated,” said Thomas J. Kane, a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education and faculty director of CEPR, who co-led the analysis. “The Education Recovery Scorecard is the first high-resolution map of the tornadoes’ path, to help district leaders ascertain the magnitude of the damage and guide local recovery efforts.”

Identifying patterns and differences

The district-level analysis indicates that the pandemic exacerbated educational inequalities based on income, showing the most pronounced learning losses among students in low-income communities and school districts.

The analysis also showed that test scores declined more, on average, in school districts where students were learning remotely than where learning took place in person. But the extent to which a school district was in person or remote was a minor factor in the change in student performance, the researchers found.

“Even in school districts where students were in person for the whole year, test scores still declined substantially on average,” said Reardon, noting the toll that pandemic-related disruptions took on students’ routines, family and social support, and mental health. “A lot of things were happening that made it hard for kids to learn. One of them seems to be the extent to which schools were open or closed, but that’s only one among many factors that seems to have driven the patterns of change.”

The data analysis was conducted by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University (EOP), an initiative launched by Reardon in 2019. The EOP houses the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), a comprehensive national database of academic performance first made available online in 2016. Since then, researchers have used the massive data set, which contains standardized reading and math test scores from students in every public school in the nation, to study variations in educational opportunity by race, gender, and socioeconomic conditions.

To generate a district-level analysis of pandemic learning loss, Reardon’s team applied an approach they developed to produce estimates of student performance that are comparable across places, grades, and years – a challenge given the discrepancy between assessments used in different states from year to year.

In addition to administering the NAEP every two years, all states are required to test students in third through eighth grades each year in math and reading, and to make the aggregated results of those tests public. Because most states use their own annual test (and define “proficiency” in different ways), researchers generally can’t compare these yearly test results from one state directly with results from another.

Reardon’s team developed a research method to overcome that challenge: By aligning the annual statewide test results with scores from the biennial NAEP, his team produces data that can be compared across states. “We use state tests to measure district-level changes in academic skills, and the NAEP test serves as a kind of Rosetta stone that lets us put these changes on the same scale,” Reardon said. “Once we equate the tests from different states, we can make apples-to-apples comparisons among districts all over the country.”

Using demographic data also housed in SEDA, the researchers can estimate how scores within an individual district compare with statewide and national averages. They can also identify trends among various subgroups of students, including racial/ethnic and socioeconomic.

For the Education Recovery Scorecard, the research team obtained annual test scores from 30 states – all that have, to date, reported their districts’ proficiency rates for their spring 2022 assessments. The remaining states will be added to the analysis as their data becomes public.

Recalibrating targets for recovery funds

The Education Recovery Scorecard also reports how much money each school district has received through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund, along with a summary of evidence on interventions that districts might implement, such as high-dose tutoring, summer school programs, extended school years, or even an optional 13th year of schooling.

The researchers hope the analysis will help policymakers and educators determine how best to direct pandemic relief funds and other efforts to support students who fell behind the most during the pandemic.

“Kids’ educational opportunities were really harmed in the past few years, and that damage was most pronounced in high-poverty communities,” Reardon said. “School districts are the first line of action to help children catch up. The better they know about the patterns of learning loss, the more they’re going to be able to target their resources effectively.”

Additional collaborators on this project include Erin Fahle, Andrew Ho, Ben Shear, Demetra Kalogrides, Jim Saliba, Julia Paris, Sadie Richardson, and Thalia Ramirez (Educational Opportunity Project); Tyler Patterson (Center for Education Policy Research); and Douglas Staiger (Dartmouth College). The Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) and the Education Recovery Scorecard are based on research funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Some of the data used in constructing the SEDA files were provided by the National Center for Education Statistics.

This story was originally published by Stanford News.

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Toward a dimensional model of risk and protective factors influencing children's early cognitive, social, and emotional development during the covid‐19 pandemic, children and adolescents' emotional problems during the covid-19 pandemic in brazil, long-term promotive and protective effects of early childcare quality on the social–emotional development in children, how did the pandemic affect the socio-emotional well-being of chilean schoolchildren a longitudinal study., child care in times of covid-19: predictors of distress in dutch children and parents when re-entering center-based child care after a 2-month lockdown, family functioning in the time of covid-19 among economically vulnerable families: risks and protective factors, adrenocortical and psychosocial responses of families in jordan to the covid‐19 pandemic, longitudinal relations between parental strain, parent–child relationship quality, and child well-being during the unfolding covid-19 pandemic, impact of covid-19 restrictions on the social-emotional wellbeing of preschool children and their families, social and psychological effects of the covid-19 pandemic on middle-school students: attendance options and changes over time., related papers.

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‘Homeschooling’ and the COVID-19 Crisis: The Insights of Parents on Curriculum and Remote Learning

Daniela fontenelle-tereshchuk.

Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB Canada

The COVID-19 crisis forced schools to temporarily close from March 2020 to June 2020, producing unpredictable changes in instructional contexts and patterns. A new concept of ‘homeschooling’ emerged which required parents to support the implementation of the curriculum through remote learning. This article is based on a case study focusing on the perceptions of experiences of ten parents of Elementary school children during the school lockdown in Alberta, Canada. Parents argue that the schools’ demands on them were unreasonable. These added to the stress of the quarantine and professional losses, and to the burden of working full-time, fulfilling household responsibilities, and having children rely mostly on parents to deliver an often brief, ‘shallow’ weekly lesson plan that lacked clear expectations and reliable assessment pieces. Parents also strongly cast doubts on the popular reliability of online education by suggesting the unsuitability of online tools to promote independent learning among young children. The study may provide valuable contributions to further inform how to better support learning from home during this ongoing pandemic.

Introduction

The year 2020 has been challenging for education. The current world crisis caused by the spread of the coronavirus has impacted the lives of everyone and changed patterns of living. Education has been greatly affected by an unpredictable reality of changing the conceptualization of home education, or what we will refer to as ‘homeschooling’.

This case study is an account of the perceptions of experiences of ten parents of children in K-6 Elementary French programs in three different school boards: Calgary Catholic School District (CCSD), Calgary Board of Education (CBE), commonly known as public schools, and Francophone School Board, in Alberta, Canada. The article is divided into four different main themes as well as subsequent sub-themes emerging from the data: The perceptions of the experiences of parents with ‘homeschooling’; the perceptions of the experiences of parents with language instruction; the perceptions of the experiences of parents with remote learning; and the perceptions of the experiences of parents on the importance of social interaction.

Literature Review

Parental support is an important factor in children’s education. According to Amaral ( 2007 ) and Sedibe and Fourie ( 2018 ), parental support enhances children’s learning and plays an essential role in their academic success. Some parents, who have the time, pedagogical skills, and resources, may choose to homeschool their children.

However, what happened in many homes in Canada is unprecedented and was a circumstantial ‘homeschooling’ choice imposed on parents caused by the fact schools were temporarily closed and learning moved from in-person to remote schooling from March 2020 to June 2020 in Alberta. A survey shows that the great majority of Canadian parents with children ranging between 4 years and 11 years old were extremely concerned about having to support their child’s education and providing childcare at the same time as maintaining a working life (Statistics Canada 2020 ). It points to the fact that many children’s daily activities were screen time related, perhaps not only due to schooling, but also a reflection of the struggle families had to manage a work-life without child support during this pandemic (Statistics Canada 2020 ).

Homeschooling, in the sense that parents educate their children in what they believe is important to pass on to new generations, has been around for centuries prior to the establishment of a formal educational system (Semali 1999 ). With indigenous peoples, for instance, elders have taught youngsters how to live well and survive in their environment through hunting, fishing, and supporting each other by playing a positive role in the daily welfare of their community (Bruchac 2014 ). In this ‘informal’ educational system, “the knowledge generated is passed on from one generation to the next in the oral mode” (George 1999 , p. 80).

In Canada, formal or traditional homeschooling, defined as “an alternative method of learning that takes place outside the school environment, where parents deliver courses and programs of learning to their children” (Statistics Canada 2018 ), is legal in all provinces and territories. In other words, homeschooling is a choice made by some parents to educate their children at home following provincial educational regulations. Provinces have different regulations on the freedom parents have over the planning and implementation of the curriculum in the homeschooling program (Van Pelt 2015 ).

However, what happened in many households during the March–June school lockdown cannot be characterized as ‘traditional homeschooling’ as parents did not choose to teach their children at home. This new ‘homeschooling’ process or model was created by the unexpected and urgent circumstances during this period. In Alberta, a lockdown was established to contain the spread of the new coronavirus that had impacted the lives of many worldwide. Schools were closed between March and June of 2020 (Alberta Education 2020a , b ), and in this case, the education of children in Elementary schools relied on remote learning and parents becoming ‘teachers’ aids’ who supported the lesson plans sent home.

The parents in this study opted to have their children in one of the French language-based programs in Alberta. French language programs are offered in different formats such as French Immersion Programs and Francophone (Alberta Education 2020b ). According to Alberta Education ( 2020b ), the Francophone program is mainly meant for French-speaking families. Differently, in French Immersion programs, parents are not required to have previous knowledge of the French language. Students are expected to be fluent in the French language after attending the K-12 French Immersion schools.

Parents play an important role in students’ academic achievements, and their inputs are key to improve education (Amaral 2007 ; Chen and Harris 2009 ). Although, Sedibe and Fourie ( 2018 ) note that “the lack of avenues for parent involvement, inadequate parent empowerment, insufficient interaction amongst parents and ineffectual school communication” are challenges often perceived in school-parents partnership processes (p. 436).

Schools as a whole including students, teachers, and parents experienced a variety of challenges imposed by the rapid changes in learning and teaching patterns during the temporary closure of schools due to the coronavirus pandemic, and specific literature in education on this topic is still scarce. Teachers, in particular, struggled to have to quickly adapt their planning and teaching approaches to remote learning and partnership with parents to implement the curriculum.

John ( 2006 ) suggests that teachers, especially more experienced ones, do not always write daily detailed lesson plans and mostly rely on their extensive experience to improvise as pedagogical opportunities arise. Wiggins and McTighe ( 2005 ) as well as Borich ( 2007 ) point to the importance of effective lesson planning in learning outcomes. An effective lesson plan reflects a clear and well-thought learning design, which promotes engagement and favors differentiated learning opportunities, and is aligned with the curriculum standards as well as formative and summative learning responsive assessment pieces (Borich 2007 ; Cicek and Tok 2014 ; Wiggins and McTighe 2005 ). Borich ( 2007 ) and Cicek and Tok ( 2014 ) remind us that teachers are key to the implementation of educational policies and any goals seeking to improve education outcomes. They draw attention to teaching effectiveness and the relevance of the process of lesson planning as

a combination of lesson objective designing, teaching, modeling, checking for understanding, re-teaching, and teacher’s self-reflection, lesson plan is a crucial element in the process of meeting national content standards and optimizing the outcome of classroom teaching and learning. (Cicek and Tok 2014 , p. 11).

Alberta classrooms, as in other parts of Canada, have grown increasingly more diverse (Briscoe and Pollock 2017 ). Having an inclusive approach to teaching, which includes “all children regardless of ability level are included in classrooms with their age-matched peers” (Sokal and Sharma 2013 , p. 59), is key to successful learning outcomes (McCrimmon 2015 ; Gray et al. 2017 ). However, ineffective teacher preparation and training to respond to the diverse needs of students have been a concern and contributed to the increased stress level of teachers, raising concerns of mental health issues among teachers (Gray et al. 2017 ).

The challenges imposed by the need for continuous professional growth to meet the demands of diverse learners, which certainly increased during the pandemic, are not always properly addressed by teacher preparation programs and/or professional development practices (McCrimmon 2015 ; Gray et al. 2017 ). According to McCrimmon ( 2015 ), the “majority of nascent teachers are underprepared for teaching in modern classrooms containing diverse learners without additional training or experience” (p. 235). Research suggests that “teaching efficacy is a context-specific construct” (Sokal and Sharma 2013 , p. 60), which might indicate that teachers’ pedagogical needs might be intrinsically connected to individualized classroom contexts. For instance, Gray et al. ( 2017 ) and Sokal and Sharma ( 2013 ) suggest that teachers, who received specific training and developed abilities to teach in inclusive environments, improved their teaching performance.

Interestingly, Oliver et al. ( 2012 ) remark that “typically when the generational gap in technology is discussed it puts students on one side of the gap and teachers on the other with a clear demarcation based on age and assumed experience” (p. 284). The use of technology for learning purposes is not a novelty to teachers in Alberta (Alberta Education 2013 ; CBE 2020 ); however, the context and needed reliance on technology for teaching purposes exercised during this pandemic was unprecedented. Alberta Education ( 2013 ) provides educators with a few recommendations on important aspects that have an impact on learning experiences when teaching in an online environment, such as providing students with clear feedback on assignments, the importance of creating a growth mindset among students, providing students “with choice within a safe learning environment that encourages measured risk-taking and innovation” (p. 20), and creating a collaborative work environment for more complex learning tasks.

The U.S. Department of Education ( 2017 ) points to the inadequate use of technology to provide learning opportunities to students outside of the school environment. It suggests that teachers might not feel they have the necessary skills to confidently pursue the use of technology for continuous learning purposes in the classroom and beyond. This factor could explain why some parents in this study noticed that teachers showed a tendency to rely heavily on pre-made materials as opposed to using technology in their lesson planning to construct authentic learning opportunities for students. Such practice may accentuate the problematic technology usage divide “between learners who are using technology in active, creative ways to support their learning and those who predominantly use technology for passive content consumption” (U.S. Department of Education 2017 , p. 7).

Beyerbach et al. ( 2001 ) point to the complexity of the process of infusing technology as a tool for learning, arguing that such a process “takes time, support, and collaboration” (p. 107).

Some important aspects should be considered to improve the use of technology in classrooms, such as providing educators with practical pedagogical opportunities to gain an understanding of how technology tools could be incorporated in their teaching in an active manner, and the necessary theoretical and modeling support through professional development initiatives and/or courses focused on helping teachers to reflect on why and how the integration of technology in the classroom could and should be done (Beyerbach et al. 2001 ).

Oliver et al. ( 2012 ) agree that although the infusion of technology in people’s daily lives has become increasingly more evident in recent years as in the case of cellphones, which are used widely not only as a mean of communication but also as a tool incorporated in daily routines such as a calendar or an alarm clock to manage time, technology has not found its niche in active and constructive instructional utilization in learning environments.

Concerns with teacher preparedness and pedagogical support reflected in the creation and implementation of lesson plans, which clearly apply technology reflectively and actively as a diverse and inclusive tool for learning, are evident (Beyerbach et al. 2001 ; McCrimmon 2015 ; Oliver et al. 2012 ). Another important concern would be the teachers’ necessary understanding of the ‘social, ethical, legal, and human’ implications of the use of technology in classrooms (Oliver et al. 2012 ). For instance, an educational resource copyright lawsuit between publishers and provinces forced about 300 teachers to have to retroactively provide 7 years’ worth of lesson plans (Stackelberg 2019 ). This could also have some other implications as such pre-made materials are most likely decontextualized.

Other challenges with the use of technology for educational purposes have also become evident during the coronavirus crisis. The potential excessive use of screen time by Elementary school-aged children during the lockdown was one of the most important concerns among sixty- four percent of parents surveyed by Statistics Canada ( 2020 ). The survey also shows that social interaction was a major concern as parents indicated that isolation might have a negative effect on their children’s overall behavior and mental health.

The current pandemic may test the popular effectiveness attributes associated with the use of technology in education. For instance, media post claims such as “research suggests that online learning has been shown to increase retention of information, and take less time, meaning the changes coronavirus have caused might be here to stay” (Li and Lalani 2020 ), may influence popular views on the effectiveness of online education as we are going through this crisis.

Alberta Education ( 2013 ) supports that “technology serves as an enabler and accelerator of the type of learning that research says works best” (p. 11). However, the impact of the use of technology for educational purposes by young children, especially between the ages of 5 to 9 years old is still unclear due to the shortage of studies addressing the topic (Holloway et al. 2013 ).

Ultimately, some literature suggests that excessive use of screen time by young children may lead to physical and mental health issues (Martin 2011 ; Rosen et al. 2014 ). It is recommended that elementary school-aged children should not be exposed to technology for more than 2 h daily (Martin 2011 ). Research also suggests that parents play a key role in how much exposure to technology children have, especially young ones (Joshi and Shukla 2019 ; Teuwen et al. 2012 ). For instance, Teuwen et al. ( 2012 ) note that “preschoolers whose mother obtains a higher level of education, are more likely to have had any online experience but less likely to use the Internet frequently” (p. 17).

Methodology

As previously mentioned in Fontenelle-Tereshchuk ( 2020b ), this case study explored the insights of ten parents of children in French language programs during the March–June 2020 school lockdown in Alberta. A case study design was chosen because it allows for an in-depth exploration of the collective and uniqueness of these parents' perceived reality of events during the school lockdown (Yin 2009 ). Focusing on the data to inform the findings of this study was important to address my bias as a parent, a schoolteacher, and a scholar.

The study applied mostly qualitative methods: A structured 8-question background survey meant to provide some statistical background information; a semi-structured 10-question individual questionnaire; and a focus group interview consisting of 3 open-ended questions, which prompted and guided a discussion among the parents (Creswell 2012 ). The focus group interview was audio-recorded via ZOOM and later transcribed.

The data was sorted and color-coded by emerging common themes in a wallmap format (Creswell 2012 ), facilitating the necessary recurring access to the data and the analyses. The data was collected in the beginning of the summer of 2020. The study is unfunded and received the approval from the Conjoint Faculties Research Ethics Board (CFREB) at the University of Calgary.

The participants were recruited through an online recruiting post on the University of Calgary website and networking. The study required participants to be parents or guardians of Elementary school children in one of the French language programs in Alberta. It is important to notice that parents with children in Elementary French programs in Alberta are part of a minority group. To keep the confidentiality of the participants, pseudonyms replaced the participants’ real names.

Limitations

The study offers an insightful view of Elementary school parents’ perspectives on the educational challenges of teaching and learning during the 2020 school lockdown in Alberta. While the experiences of these parents might resonate with many other parents in Alberta and/or around the world, the study is limited statistically due to its contextualized sample size.

The parents in this study strongly argue that remote learning does not promote independent learning and is not suitable for Elementary school-aged children. They think of technology as a tool that when/if well-utilized can be helpful to facilitate learning; however, it is not a replacement for teachers. These parents suggest that the main focus of teaching during the lockdown was the technology itself, and not the curriculum and the teaching and learning process. Teachers and schools might have mistakenly believed that if children had access to technology and knew how to mechanically use it, they would independently learn through remote learning. The perceived experiences of these parents during the schools’ closure between March–June 2020 contradict this assumption.

The parents point to necessary changes in the way teachers are trained and the support they need to continue growing their skills in creating contextualized and engaging lesson plans with clear expectations and integrated assessment tailored to students’ specific needs and utilizing technology in an informed and active manner. Parents also draw attention to the importance of recognizing and utilizing parental support in children’s education, indicating a need for improvement of collaborative practices between parents and schools.

Parents, Themes, and Sub-themes

It is important to notice that none of the parents reported a lack of access to the technology students needed to learn from home, and in the context of this study, it is assumed that students had the technology needed available during this process. Parents might have other children at home, and the ones reported in this study were only those attending the Elementary schools in a French program, assumed to be 5 years to 11 years old.

The following summary of the parents’ backgrounds is mostly based on the answers to the survey questions. It is intended to provide an understanding of the different contexts as well as a brief parental demographic overview.

The following themes and sub-themes emerged mostly from the individual questionnaires and the focus-group interview.

The Perceptions of the Experiences of Parents with ‘Homeschooling’

Many have referred to the phenomenon of teaching from home during the lockdown as home-based education or ‘homeschooling’, that is to say, a partnership between schools and parents to support children’s continuing education while schools were temporarily closed.

In terms of teachers’ instruction, parents strongly argue that there was an apparent assumption that Elementary school children would be able to manage the technology and work independently on the assignments and that the support required from parents would be minimal.

Parents as Partners: A Failed Communication Approach

Parents were asked to take on an important role as the main support of this ‘homeschooling’ process. What could have been a true partnership, where schools and parents would communicate well and be aware of each other needs and suggestions, establishing a clear and constructive channel of communication, did not happen. For many parents, this process was physically and mentally exhausting as well as a frustrating task.

The communication between teachers and parents was for the most part via email. Feedback on assignments was vague and often not helpful to guide parents on how well their children were doing and which areas they had to improve. As Macy explains that.

Through these entire three and half months, we may be submitted five things to the teachers to view, [emphasizing with gesture showing 5 fingers] Five things! And there was not feedback that was of any meaningful, they [teachers] were like “Yeah, you did what you were asked to do” and that’s it! And I was expecting a little more feedback because the feedback of me for my son is not as meaningful as the teacher’s feedback. (data extract).

Nate also has some important remarks about the ineffective use of communication by Alberta Education and school boards with regards to parents. She says.

I think there was a big [pause], a big part that was missing. The Alberta Education to parents and the school boards to parents as well with regards to time expectations because the Alberta government was not expecting the kids to be in schools from 9 [am] until 3 [pm] on-at-home environment. So, I think that the [lack of the] communication piece also [pause] [contributed to] coming to this. (data extract).

Balancing Work Responsibilities and ‘Homeschooling’

The great majority of parents in this study felt overwhelmed trying to balance their professional obligations with their responsibility to support their children’s emotional and academic needs, especially during a perceived financial crisis when many had lost their jobs and/or were trying to get back into the job market while others were afraid of losing their current jobs.

Jessica, a full-time working mother, suggests that the educational system could have provided better support for children, not relying on busy and untrained parents as the main teaching support source. As she explains that.

For math, they [her children/students] got some PowerPoints that they were supposed to read. So luckily their father [her children’s father] is a math ‘wiz’. So, he started to teach them every single day for an hour because after a few weeks, he realized that ‘these kids are going to forget absolutely everything’. We both work full-time, and I have been in the office [ah] still every day, so it was all up to the dad to work on this. And I could help after I would get from home [work], which was too late, and the things were already done by that time. And so, I find it, it just not doable we can’t be here instead of the educational system. (data extract).

Carol, a stay–at–home mother, suggests that she also had to step in and buy extra teaching supplies and rely on her teaching skills to support her Kindergarten child during this ‘homeschooling’ process. As she explains that.

She [her daughter] goes to Francophone school, so there were a lot of links sent to me and I used the materials quite a lot when I was ‘homeschooling’ her. So, it worked quite well. So, I bought lots of books on the market place. On KIJIJI, people who were selling French books, people that didn’t need them. So, I would go to find the deals and, I just bought a lot of French books and worked from that as well. So, I used my own resources as well as the stuff online [provided by teachers]. (data extract).

DDM627, a full-time health-care worker, suggests that not all parents have the skills and the required time availability to take on the responsibility of ‘homeschooling’ their children.

He/she argues that.

My experience trying to motivate my kids and have them focus on schoolwork has proven to me that homeschooling would not be for our family. Also, working full time has made it challenging timewise. (data extract).

KMacB, a full-time working mother, also agrees that the ‘homeschooling’ model used by schools, which relied mainly on parents to implement the curriculum, was ineffective. KMacB says she is “not in favour of home-based education” as the one they had during the lockdown.

She seems to welcome in-person learning experiences for Elementary students with social distancing health rules in place.

Underestimated Parental Support Needed

The parents in this study strongly suggest that there was an over-reliance on parents to mainly implement the ‘homeschooling’ curriculum during the lockdown, disregarding the fact that many parents do not have the pedagogical skills and need to work to support their families.

This could be due to the fact that little is known of the use of technology for learning purposes among young children (Holloway et al. 2013 ).

Anni, a full-time working mother, explains that her Grade 2 daughter’s teacher did a good job providing the students with pre-recorded videos to support a research project in Social Studies. Even though that was helpful, it still did not lead to engagement and independent remote learning, and parental support was essential to complete the assignment. She argues that.

And so, I think she [teacher] tried her best, but I don’t think this is optimal in any way for young children. But no matter how, [frustrated gesture] we can discuss how to optimize and stuff like this but it just NOT, it is not an optimal system for learning. (data extract).

KMacB speaks to the struggles parents faced keeping the continuing pace of school learning without the necessary pedagogic knowledge. It is important to notice that when parents enroll their children in the French Immersion program, they are not required to be French speakers (Alberta Education 2020b ).

My youngest daughter [Grade 1] was doing very well. At the moment, we are struggling to continue with her learning and her reading skills are not progressing nearly as well as I would have expected them to in school. She simply isn’t exposed to the language enough and that is a big concern for us. I believe she is losing interest in reading in French because her progress is so slow. The fact that I am trying to teach a 7-year-old to read in a language that I don’t speak or understand is crazy. (data extract).

Ralph, a stay–at–home father, notes that the challenges of ‘homeschooling’ during the lockdown for stay–at–home parents were also evident. He explains that “I found it hard to balance homework with other household chores especially since I do not speak French” (data extract).

Macy, a currently unemployed mother, “agree[s] [that] the amount of help that grade two students need from parents is really big in this curriculum” (data extract).

Jessica, a home-office commuting full-time working mother, speaks of her hopes for Fall 2020. She says that.

I really hope that in the Fall, we will do the best as a society to put them [children/students] back in school because this is bad! [pause] just…[pause] for the rest of us as adults it’s bad to be isolated, it is bad for the kids as well. And I feel that brings a [deep breath followed by a pause] spring is going deteriorate by [students/her children] doing absolutely nothing and, I will try to give them books to read. But I am not an expert to give them [her children] all the online tools, and quite frankly, I come home tired from work and I am expecting the educational system to do it [to teach]. (data extract).

Myths About Remote Learning: “The Older Children Versus Younger Children”

There has also been an apparent assumption that older students, in the case of this study perhaps students in Grade 5–6, or 10 to 11 years old, would be more independent learning remotely and not require as much support from teachers and/or parents compared to younger children in Grades K-4, or 5 to 9 years old. The parents in this study suggest that this is not always the case, as many factors come into play in the context of Elementary school children, such as subjects, emotional conditions, special needs, etc..

DDM627 argues that depending on the subject, her two daughters experienced different learning challenges and outcomes with remote learning. She notes that.

Between my 2 girls, I would say they were average, above average. [pause] [They are] still in early grades so this isn’t really a focus. But I would say my younger one is doing worse when it comes to speaking French…the older one, reading…. But math probably did not change. (data extract).

Jessica refers to the potentially complex individual household contexts, and how that might also have influenced remote learning. She notes that.

I feel that there were so many different combinations of the family situations, there were no families that would not face[d] challenges. And yet, somebody would be in the office; like somebody in some families, both parents were working at home; and some [ah] both parents lost [their] jobs. So, small kids, big kids, and everybody had it difficult in [ah] different ways. (data extract).

KMacB has an older child in Grade 5 with special needs who required significant parental support for academic and emotional matters during this ‘homeschooling’ process. She explains that.

Our eldest daughter (grade 5) was an average student. She has required far more parent support than we expected, and the content provided by her teacher has FAR exceeded the government’s recommended 1 h/day. I definitely see a loss of confidence since moving to online learning. It also took MANY weeks for her to adapt to receiving a weeks’ worth of content all at once.

Carol, a Kindergarten mother, believes remote learning is not ideal for young children as her child could not focus during the remote learning classes. She argues that, for example, learning about animals by visiting a ‘virtual’ zoo video did not seem to engage her daughter in learning, and that she needed hands-on experiences. Carol also explains that her child was still getting used to the school environment and routines, so the fostered learning parental support she received during this process played a positive role in improving her academic skills.

The Perceptions of the Experiences of Parents with Language Instruction

The parents’ language role.

French is one of the two official languages in Canada. Many programs are available to foster students’ interest in learning the French language and culture (Alberta Education 2020b ). One of these programs is the Francophone program that is mainly intended to support minority Francophone families, but also other members of the community with a French language background.

Most parents of students in the Francophone program can speak French as in the case of Carol, who argued that her Kindergarten child improved her language skills during the lockdown. Carol, a stay–at–home mother, used her teaching skills to teach and also her own money to purchase appropriate extra teaching materials to support her child’s learning. She argues that her child was too young and shy as she had just started attending school for a few months before the school closure. Carol says.

I speak French, so I was able to help her [her kindergarten daughter] learn the language and ah [pause] when she went to kindergarten, she didn’t know anything in French and by the end of being ‘homeschooled’, she started reading in French and learning words and vocabulary. So, she [her daughter] was learning quite quickly at home as opposed to a classroom setting where the teacher per se 20 kid or so; when here I am just [for] her, of course my little 3-year-old [presumed other child] doesn’t do any ‘schooling’ now, which [pause] so I was focused pretty much on her. (data extract).

All the other parents had children in the French Immersion program, where parents are not required to speak French. One of these parents was Anni, who spoke French and whose child is a second-grader in a Calgary Catholic School District school. She noticed that her child struggled and needed support to finish school assignments. Anni believes that remote learning is not ideal and supported the safe return to in-person classes as she and her partner work full-time and finding the extra-time to mainly support their children at home was overwhelmingly difficult.

Gio argues that “the main challenge was not knowing French to teach and help my 10-year- old son and finding the time to do that between all the other things I do at home” (data extract). Her words might summarise the feelings of many parents during this ‘homeschooling’ process.

DDM627, another parent who did not speak French, notes that “educationally, I’m sure their French language skills are suffering…[pause] it’s like an extra-long summer vacation where French is minimal” (data extract).

The Lack of Language Support

Another issue identified by these parents was the lack of effective language support as most of their children are in the French Immersion program, which does not necessarily require parents to speak French (Alberta Education 2020b ). KMacB, for instance, remarks that.

With only one ‘weak’ French-speaking adult in the home, we struggled to both help the children with their schoolwork, as well as to expose them to French. Balancing working from home and helping our 2 elementary children with their schoolwork was very challenging. There were simply not enough hours in the day for us to parent, teach, submit their work, and do our career work. This model is unsustainable. (data extract) Nate, a full-time working mother, suggests that expecting parents, especially in non-French-speaking households, to mainly support ‘homeschooling’ during the lockdown was one of the biggest challenges.

She remarks that.

I will just say that ahh [pause] that ‘one’ [pause] the biggest challenges is that we do not speak French ourselves at our house, so having our kids speaking French and hearing French during COVID has been a big challenge. (data extract).

The great majority of the eight parents in this same program whose children attend public schools did not speak French. Overall, they felt overwhelmed to be in the position of being the main provider of instruction in a language most of them did not speak. Teachers provided an average of an hour weekly of remote learning instruction, and asked parents to support the daily activities sent home in French, and sometimes in English in the weekly lesson plan.

For instance, Karen, a full-time working mother and one of the three parents in the study that could speak French, argues that as a full-time worker, she found it challenging to attend to the degree of parental teaching support required by the remote learning in her child’s school.

She believes her child will be fine academically as she is still in the initial grades, but she agrees that the average of an hour weekly of provided remote teacher instruction was not ideal and should be reconsidered in the future. Karen remarks.

I was personally working that time-period during the pandemic, so I was the only one who speaks French in our house, so I had to help our daughter during that time. I found that quite difficult [nervous smile] help her during the day, so becomes the time really to do it at night and, growing frustration in both her and myself. (data extract).

The Perceptions of the Experiences of Parents with Curriculum and Remote Learning

Teachers and curriculum: misunderstandings of technology purpose.

Parents’ perceptions of what approaches worked best are of key importance in moving forward. The parents suggest that technology alone, without strong teaching, social and emotional support, does not work well with Elementary school-aged children. That is to say, technology is a teaching tool that if well-utilized, can facilitate learning.

KMacB notes that there was an apparent overreliance on technology for teaching purposes, and also an assumption that students could independently manage and self-teach themselves through technology. She remarks.

Neither of our children was as independent as their teachers seemed to think they should be. Likely partly stress-related, but also unrealistic expectations around what they [children] could and could not do. There simply wasn’t enough instructional time with their teachers. (data extract).

Nate notes that technology itself seemed to have been the main focus during this process.

She suggests that teachers did not seem very well-prepared to technically utilize the different types of online platforms available and struggled to manage to teach using technology as a tool. Nate says.

Another big challenge for us has been the diverse forms of presentations that the students [hum correcting] that their teachers are giving. It’s been a lot of technical challenges as opposed to the language challenges, not a lot of focus on the language but more on the technical. So that would be my thoughts. (data extract).

Gio points to the need to better utilize technology as a tool for teaching and learning in a pedagogically organized manner as opposed to relying on technology to ‘replace’ the instructional role of teachers, which could potentially affect the differentiated need of catering teaching to the unique classroom contexts. Gio remarks.

I do really believe the schools tried to come up with good technology solutions to help with the learning but to have a teacher supervise and be there to explain subjects it is the best way to teach and learn. (data extract).

Nate argues that assignment timing flexibility was also a factor missing in the lesson plans that impacted learning in her household. As she explains that.

And the quiz times were very specific, and they didn’t have a lot of flexibility given our family needed a lot of flexibility. So, that would have been nice if they could have used more of the flexibility and had more resources. (data extract).

Carol sees the benefits of using online resources, but she argues that even when such resources are useful, they are still limited when it comes to the value associated with personal learning interactions, especially among Kindergarteners. Carol explains that.

The online stuff [resources] was quite useful but moving forward I would recommend using more the online tools. I think the best way they learn is hearing the language, being with their friends and their teachers, hearing it absorbing the sounds, the phrases, and being involved, having them communicate with their friends. (data extract).

DDM627 believes that one–on–one conversations are important even in the ‘online’ or virtual classroom. As he/she argues that.

The more video calls, especially 1:1 conversation, the better with my kids. Forces them to listen to and speak French, in a non-intimidating environment. Neither of my kids tend to speak up in groups naturally. (data extract).

Karen agrees that children need more interaction with teachers. She says that.

The time they [teachers] did [interact with the kids] was good because it was reading for the most part. They [teachers] had each student with groups, small groups of four or five children, and then they would be reading from a book, and they would each take turns, but just [short pause] it wasn’t enough for [in] my opinion. (data extract).

Nate suggests that schools when using remote learning should focus more “maybe it have been better to focus on math and literacy” (data extract). She also adds that her oldest daughter responded well to her teacher’s efforts to interact using technology when it was used more interactively. She says that.

And [the teacher] really made an effort to make a connection with the kids and they were doing sort of things like ‘her [daughter’s] favorite thing’… and [ah] that they [children/students] had around the house and bring their favorite stuffy to class’ and those kids’ kind of things. (data extract).

Curriculum Design: Disconnected ‘Chunks’ as Opposed to a Wholly Integrated Learning Plan

After mental health (Fontenelle-Tereshchuk 2020b ), the ineffective use of pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning during the lockdown was one of the main issues for these parents.

The parents in this study suggest that the curriculum was mainly delivered as ‘chunks’ according to the available pre-made ‘one-size-fits-all’ online resources that not always had a clear learning purpose. The lesson planning often resembled ‘instructional notes’ style format, missing important connecting pieces, such as clear curriculum learning objectives and an associated assessment piece. Such overall lesson planning was usually sent all together at the beginning of the week.

KMacB speaks of the challenges that she faced trying to manage the large amounts of content sent all at once. She suggests that it was up to the parents to re-plan or personalize the implementation of the curriculum according to their children’s differentiated needs timewise. She explains that.

Receiving the content weekly was challenging as the kids were unable to break the work down into manageable daily “chunks” and we had to spend time at the start of each week figuring out how to break the assignments down into reasonable daily accomplishments. (data extracts).

Nate argues that such disconnection and lack of effective planning could easily be felt in the online assignments. She explains that her children were receiving pre-made ‘one-size-fits-all’ online materials, sometimes in English but were being assessed in French for these assignments. She remarks that.

I do not think that [teachers] really utilized the D2L platform, in terms of giving students quizzes or having them to submit assignments. And I was also a little frustrated at times when the students [corrects herself] my children were receiving videos in English to learn the concepts in English, the videos were in English! [suggesting the students were assessed in French]. (data extract).

Another issue was the weekly instructional time, which in most public schools varied from 1 h weekly to 30 min every other week, leaving it up to parents to make up for the extra needed instructional support children required. Occasionally, instructional videos were made by some teachers and sent home. In these rare opportunities, parents found that it worked well and alleviated some of the pressure on them.

Jessica was critical of what she perceived as the difference among schools, and perhaps school boards’ teaching and learning approach during the lockdown. She claims that some school boards were more effective than others. Jessica remarks.

I chose the public [school] system because I think that the public system is as capable as the private and we should not settle for less. Our teachers are as equals and educated as to the teachers from the private sector and I would like them to step up and show us what they can do. Just like in the other schools, where the teachers could figure it out. I hope they [students] will go to school; I hope we don’t ever have to learn this [again]. And we can silver line back and forth but it the end they [students] didn’t learn what they were supposed to learn. (data extract).

Nate points to the lack of consistency and contextualization as well as differentiated learning approaches felt throughout this process, impacting students’ engagement in learning. KMacB and Nate suggest that the responsibility of the ineffective learning outcomes of this lockdown process can not solely be bestowed on teachers, but a combined responsibility of levels of education bodies such as Alberta Education, school boards, and schools. KMacB explains that.

I think the school boards have to make a much bigger commitment to providing “real”, teacher-led learning opportunities for the students most of the time. Perhaps that means consistent delivery of curriculum during the pandemic. So that if we need to move back to remote learning, a centralized team can curate the content and the classroom teachers can spend more time with the students. (data extract).

The ‘Disconnection’ in the Use of Technology Tools for Teaching and Learning Purposes

Another important point in this study was the utilization of technology available to teach and most importantly to interact with children. The parents claim that teachers’ planning was often ‘shallow’ and missed the potential offered by technology to provide more interactive learning opportunities for students. For example, KMacB argues that “the instructions were in the Google Classroom for the kid/parents to read and that just does not align with the learning styles of children” (data extract).

The technology tools used during the pandemic were not a novelty for many teachers as many of these tools may have been available to teachers and students to support learning prior to this pandemic, but not every teacher chooses or knows how to utilize them for teaching purposes. As Jessica explains.

I guess for us, for three weeks there was no online learning. First week was like “oh, we have to figure it out what to do”. Next [second] week was like “oh, we have spring break, so [parents] do not contact us [teachers]”. Third week, we’re asked a few times to figure it out what to do. And I find it unacceptable. (data extract).

There seems to have been an assumption on the part of teachers and/or schools that children, especially in this case young children, could learn through technology without much support from teachers or parents. Parents in this study wondered if any potential similar homeschooling situation could be improved by investigating how much teachers understand and are trained to utilize technology in their lesson planning without mainly relying on pre-made ‘one-size-fits-all’ online lessons, assignments, and assessment pieces available. KMacB argues that

in the early days, she [her daughter] really struggled with seeing a weekly math assignment that consisted of 20 pages in the Google Classroom + assignments in Netmath… it was overwhelming. She has ADHD, so that also contributed to her challenges and we had to work closely with her to chunk the work down into manageable amounts, but this is an ongoing challenge. (data extract).

The parents suggest that schools/teachers underestimated the need for parental support in managing technology during the ‘homeschooling’ process. There was a misunderstanding of students’ abilities to independently manage the weekly plan and self-teach themselves through technology. As DDM627 notes, the difficulties her Grade 1 daughter had in working on her own, even if the plan “was clear enough” to follow “[but] getting her to sit down and focus on it has been VERY challenging” (data extract).

The Inadequacy of Supporting Resources

The parents in this study also argue that perhaps associated with the noticeable scattered lesson plans, there was an overreliance on available pre-made online teaching resources that not always adequately addressed the differentiated needs of students and/or the specific curriculum focuses.

Nate suggests that perhaps teachers did not have adequate materials available, especially in French. She notes that.

It seems that there was a lack of resources for those teachers to be using to present to the children, to the students. So, I found that a kind of frustrating cause they would have videos in English and then the quizzes in French. Macy also agrees with Nate’s remarks and adds that. I was thinking that in French immersion this is not really acceptable [emotional sarcastic laugh] because they were doing pretty much the learning in English in our house. So that was a big challenge, and I agree with [that] the amount of help that grade two students need from parents is really big in this curriculum. (data extract).

Jessica adds that lack of access and/or the mechanical skills to manage technology were not a problem in her household. The challenge lays in how technology was apparently misunderstood and not utilized as much as it could have been by teachers/schools to convey contextualized learning. As Jessica explains.

there was no technical issue for us as we ah [pause] my husband is an IT specialist, so (ah) he set up everybody with everything and we were helping each other because we have two kids and the grade five is easier than the grade two. However, we do not speak French, so that the one hour per week interaction in French is completely inadequate. (data extract).

The Perceptions of the Experiences of Parents on the Importance of Social Interaction

Mental health.

Another concern the parents in this study had was the mental health of their children and the possible ramifications of the lockdown. This was discussed extensively in the Fontenelle-Tereshchuk ( 2020b ) article “Mental health and the COVID-19 crisis: The hopes and concerns for children as schools re-open” based on this same study.

Overall, Fontenelle-Tereshchuk ( 2020b ), the American Academy of Pediatrics ( 2020 ), and Sick Kids Foundation ( 2020 ) highlight the possible impact of the lack of social interaction among children during the lockdown on children’s mental and physical health. Fontenelle-Tereshchuk ( 2020b ) suggests that it is fundamentally important to address potential mental health challenges among Elementary school children when they return to school to help them to develop mechanisms to cope with the drastic rapid changes that affected lives during schools’ lockdown.

Discussions and Recommendations

The circumstances of this crisis were unprecedented in recent times. Education is striving to respond quickly and adequately to the sudden changes in patterns of teaching and learning, and parental support is a topic center-stage in this process. Research suggests that parental support is an important factor in students’ academic success (Amaral 2007 ; Chen and Harris 2009 ; Sedibe and Fourie 2018 ). However, parents who enroll their children in in-person programs in schools are usually not expected to be the main educational support provider.

In terms of the context of this study, even though parents could afford to provide their children with the technology they needed to support remote learning, there were other challenges. The pandemic affected the economy worldwide and many parents, particularly the parents in this study, had to deal with the uncertainty of the labor market that may have caused some of them to lose their jobs. Nine out of ten parents in this study had a minimum of a University degree and did not report the ability to manage technology or the accessibility to computers being an issue during this remote learning process. However, the majority of these parents were working full-time, while some were currently unemployed and/or perhaps concerned about how to get back into the uncertain job market.

The reality was that many parents felt that the main responsibility for their children’s continuing learning from home during this period was on their shoulders. Parents were ‘forced’ to juggle their own personal and professional struggles and needs with the needs of their children for continuity of receiving an education during this stressful crisis. The perceived experiences of these parents might point to gaps in research and teachers’ training on how young children learn through technology (Holloway et al. 2013 ), especially regarding independent learning. That is to say, the fact that many children can easily use the functions of electronic devices, and perhaps play video games and use social media for entertainment purposes, does not necessarily mean that they can use these devices independently for academic purposes.

One of the problems associated with remote learning during the lockdown was that the role of parents was not clearly defined and, the communication between schools and parents was deficient. Parents were ‘forced’ to take on a new and challenging role as ‘co’ teachers (World Bank Group 2020 ). Apparently, parental support was meant to be complementary to the online instruction and interactions between the schoolteachers and the students, but such parental-required support time was inconsistent as instructional remote learning offered to students was often ineffective and varied depending on schools, teachers, and/or school boards.

Parents also suggest that the ‘formal’ weekly home lesson plan was easy to follow, but vague and lacked an integrated and effective assessment piece. The parents in this study point to an apparent disconnection in the different parts that compose a ‘whole’ unit and lesson plans. They suggest that little attention was given to curriculum design as a harmonious and purposely catered teaching and learning plan suggested by research, which includes interconnected learning objectives, activities, and assessment aligned with the Alberta Program of Study (Alberta Education 2020c ; Borich 2007 ; Cicek and Tok 2014 ; Wiggins and McTighe 2005 ). Such curriculum design should respond to the students’ context and differentiated learning needs, which should be clearly reflected in the lesson plan, allowing teachers to make necessary adjustments in the course of implementation guided by integrated ongoing and purposely designed assessment (Borich 2007 ; Cicek and Tok 2014 ; Wiggins and McTighe 2005 ).

The issues related to curriculum design and implementation discussed in this study bring attention to two common problems in teacher education (Fontenelle-Tereshchuk 2019 ): (1) The often-suggested disconnection between theory and practice, or generally speaking, the disconnection between teacher education and the classroom reality of teachers. I agree with McDonough ( 2012 ) that “teacher educators require a theoretically and practically helpful model for situating their work” (p. 8); (2) Professional development initiatives that do not always succeed in addressing teachers’ specific reflective and skillset needs to support students’ learning (Broad and Evans 2006 ; Fontenelle-Tereshchuk 2019 ; Villegas-Reimers 2003 ).

The remote learning process due to this pandemic might have exacerbated the problem and have made the challenges of teachers teaching without the appropriate training and/or support to respond to the wide range of students’ needs more evident to parents. This phenomenon could be described as ‘bursting the bubble’ to rethink how we are supporting the professional growth of teachers. In the current educational scenario, a review of the effectiveness of curriculum design practices among classroom teachers should be addressed by professional development initiatives, teacher preparation programs, and further studies.

Another interesting challenge the parents highlighted about remote learning was that schools/teachers may have underestimated the support students needed to use technology for educational purposes. Parents remarked that most teachers did not fully utilize the technology available to provide enough and/or proper quality instructional time with students and that learning resources were scarce and often disengaging during this remote learning process.Although there is no intention of making a comparative examination of the remote learning effectiveness among the three school boards represented in this case study, there are some important observations to be made. The eight parents, whose children attend public schools, seemed to be very frustrated with the time dedicated to remote learning interactions between teachers and students as well as the utilization of this time to establish effective learning opportunities. For instance, Macy argues that her son had as low as 30 min of teacher-student interactional instruction every other week, and such interactions were student-group based which would provide her child with five to ten minutes of remote learning interaction with his teacher every two weeks. The other seven parents in the public system argue that their children had an average of an hour of student-group based teacher-student interaction instruction a week, which they felt was not enough to support learning remotely and may have had an impact on the mental health of children and parents due to the increase in the level of stress. Even though these parents also noticed a slight difference among teachers’ approaches and effectiveness, they felt that some teachers put more effort into interacting with students and providing extra materials, but that such materials were often not catered to address the students’ specific learning needs and the time interacting with students was not nearly enough.

In contrast, Anni, a parent in the Calgary Catholic School District, argued that her child was offered two hours daily of teacher–student interaction, and sometimes the teacher would record videos explaining the content and send them to students. It is important to notice that even though this parent seemed to suggest that her child’s teacher did her best teaching remotely, she adds that her child still required significant parental support in addition to the support offered by the school.

Carol, a parent in a Francophone school argues that her Kindergarten daughter had 3 h of remote learning daily which was good, but not always very engaging. She felt that her child did well and improved academically. However, such learning improvement could be circumstantial as the parent also indicates that in addition to the three hours of daily teacher and student instruction interaction provided by the school, this parent had teaching experience, spoke French, and spent money on extra-resources and extra instructional time working with her Kindergarten child.

The possible differences in school remote learning practices might indicate that Alberta Education, school boards, and schools failed to provide adequate support to teachers and parents with clear and consistent guidelines for the implementation of remote learning throughout the province. A review of the overall COVID-19 educational response plan to improve pedagogically, organizational, and implementational support to the school community should have a positive impact on future learning outcomes.

Overall, parents strongly agree that remote learning is not as effective as in-class learning for Elementary school children. After all, for the majority of parents, who worked full-time or were looking for employment as well as busy stay–at–home parents attending to household chores, some of them with children in different grades, it was difficult to provide the students with the extra parental support needed to use technology for educational purposes.

This study seems to also cast doubt on the popular excitement over the efficiency of online education on students’ autonomy and academic learning outcomes, especially commonly seen in social media posts. For instance, this post titled “The COVID-19 pandemic has changed education forever: This is how” might suggest online learning to be ‘the solution’ for the lockdown woes in education (Li and Lalani 2020 ). This study, however, points to the uncertainty of technology effectiveness use in online learning education, especially among young children (Holloway et al. 2013 ). The study indicates that technology can be utilized for teaching and learning purposes, but teachers are still essential to instrument learning in online environments, especially in Elementary school contexts. Such findings may contribute to expanding the narrative of remote learning and the effectiveness of online tools discourses beyond the assumption that ‘children might not learn because they do not have access to the technology needed, or perhaps the ‘mechanical training’.

In this study specifically, children had access to the required technology to learn in a remote learning format, yet parents still strongly suggested that remote learning is not ideal for young children. These parents suggest two main reasons why remote learning is not ideal for young children: Firstly, even in the best-case scenario when students have and can mechanically use the technology, they still need in-person support to stay focused and to answer ‘the often many’ questions about the content. And secondly, these young students strongly need hands-on experiences and interaction with their peers. The study also seems to indicate that older children in Grades 5–6 might be more susceptible to anxiety, most likely due to possible changes and the overall uncertainty of the near future, and social isolation.

Obviously, what is happening due to this global crisis could never be anticipated by previous research, but some questions could help us to reflect on the impact of this pandemic in education. Questions, such as ‘Are we being overly confident and reliant on the premises of the self-learning effectiveness of the use of technology for learning purposes?’, ‘Indeed, is perhaps more research needed to further understand how Elementary school children respond to remote learning and how effective it actually is?’, and ‘How can we rethink teacher education and reflect on what professional growth means to teachers?’.

This study recommends that independently of the different approaches to teaching and curriculum choices, the ability to design a lesson plan that is effective in attending to the differentiated needs of students is of key importance. A meaningful approach to curriculum design in its interconnected wholesomeness is essential to support the needs of teachers for professional growth in in-person and/or online teaching environments. Another recommendation is to think of schools as a community of human-diverse learners (Fontenelle-Tereshchuk 2020a ), improving the supportive learning relationships developed between school and community, especially parents. More attention has to be given to the importance of developing constructive relationships with parents to continue to support learning from home. These inclusive relationships are key to building a bridge between homes and schools. The last recommendation would come from research efforts to support education in finding a balance between including technology as a vehicle to communicate learning, well-utilized to support learning and understanding that technology does not replace the key instructional role of well-prepared teachers.

In conclusion, I would agree with Earl ( 2013 ) as she argues that “schools reflect the changes that are occurring more broadly in the society, and there seems to be no end to changes (economic, cultural and political) that schools are expected to keep up with and even lead” (p. 2). Recent changes due to this health, economic and social crisis ignited by the coronavirus pandemic in schools have been dramatic, and it might take time, research, and practical implementation to support the necessary adjustments to address the current complex educational challenges. Parents’ insights on remote learning might be key to reflect on the overall aspects that need to be improved in terms of teacher instructional growth support, school–parent relationships, and leadership policies to support learning whether in-person and/or online environments moving forward.

Compliance with Ethical Standards

There are no known conflicts of interest.

This study is unfunded and received the University of Calgary Ethics approval.

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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“Hey, What do you Need?”: How Head Start Directors Responded to COVID-19 Challenges

• Published: 18 June 2024

Cite this article

• H. Callie Silver   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9490-4913 1 &
• Sarai Coba-Rodriguez 2  

Since its inception in 1965, Head Start has provided low-income families with wraparound early childhood programming. Serving nearly a million children and families nationwide, Head Start’s “Whole Child” philosophy was particularly evident during COVID-19 when families faced unprecedented disruptions at home, school, and work. Utilizing qualitative interviews with 20 Head Start Directors from multiple regions in Illinois and across two different time-points, this study aims to identify the resources that Head Start programs provided for families during COVID-19, and describe the challenges they faced. Findings revealed that all Head Start centers provided families with basic need resources, while some, through community partnerships and granteerelationships, were able to secure additional funding to allocate cash awards for families in more dire need. Using technology needed for remote learning was a challenge for staff, teachers, and families, and many Directors expressed that their ability to continue meeting the needs of children with special needs during closures was less than ideal. Our findings highlight the critical role that Head Start plays for families and ways that practice can be improved in non-pandemic times.

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Silver, H., Coba-Rodriguez, S. “Hey, What do you Need?”: How Head Start Directors Responded to COVID-19 Challenges. Early Childhood Educ J (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-024-01700-1

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Relationship between parental stress and Islamic coping strategies in managing children's education during covid-19 pandemic

• Raffar, Izzah Nur Aida Zur
• Adnan, Sarah Dina Mohd
• Dahalan, Nang Naemah Nik
• Aziz, Nurul Sakinah
• Nasir, Mariam Farhana Md
• Jalani, Hamidah
• Kadir, Nor Adina Abdul

Islamic coping strategies among the concerns that need to be address in dealing with the parental stress especially during the outbreak of covid-19. The Movement Control Order (MCO) during pandemic adversely give significant impacts in many aspects of human life especially emotional and psychological health. It was led people having stress, anxiety, loneliness, sadness, as well as persistent financial strain. Besides, it may add to the existing stress faced by parents as they need to concern about their children's mental and emotional health and adapting the drastic changes in teaching and learning (PdP) methods from face to face to online through home-based teaching and learning (PdPR). Thus, there is an urgent need to provide comprehensive strategies and approach for dealing with parental difficulties in order to support the continuation of family harmony and wellbeing. Therefore, the objective of this study is 1) to identify the level of difference in parental stress between different sex (mothers and fathers), and 2) to analyse the relationship between parental stress and Islamic coping strategies in managing children's education during the pandemic. The quantitative approach was utilised. A survey distributed online among parents (N = 516) using purposive sampling techniques. Data were analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), and Mann Whitney and the Spearman rho correlation test. Result shows that there was a significant difference on parental stress between sex and significant relationship between the two variables studied. Hence, it is hoped that this study not only provide fruitful knowledge to all parents especially Muslim families but could be made as reference or guidelines to the authoritative bodies in developing effective approach to empower the well-being of families in Malaysia.

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