Online Learning during COVID-19

Proceedings of The 4th International Conference on Research in Teaching and Education

Year: 2021

DOI:

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Online Learning during COVID-19

Ranjit Vijayan

ABSTRACT: 

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on our life. It has significantly affected education and how it is delivered. Nearly all, if technology permitted, course delivery switched to an online mode during the early stage of the pandemic and still continues to remain so in many cases. Educators have shared their experience related to this in a large number of recent publications. The main aim of this study was to analyze such publications and to identify key themes related to “online teaching” during COVID-19. Abstracts of publications that were returned by a Scopus search of  “online teaching COVID-19” were downloaded and key themes were identified using topic modeling, a natural language processing method. Three key themes were identified: (a) challenges faced by teachers and educators when they had to rapidly switch to online teaching, (b) how course offerings were updated or redesigned to be offered online, and (c) how online learning affected health related aspects including mental health of students and healthcare training. While teaching pedagogies and technological tools have aided online learning to some extent prior to the pandemic, the scale at which it was deployed during the pandemic has been phenomenal. In fact, lessons learned indicate that much of this will likely continue post COVID-19, when things return to the new normal.

Keywords: challenges; education; mental health; teachers; topic modeling.