COVID-19 and the use of digital technology in mathematics education

Abstract

Once the COVID-19 crisis is over, will everything” return to normal” or will we instead witness an ongoing boom in online learning? A time of crisis is an opportunity for all education systems to look to the future; there is enormous potential for digital technology in mathematics education, regardless of the impact of COVID-19. In this paper, the researcher focuses on answering two research questions: (1) Is COVID-19 the gateway for digital learning in mathematics education? (2) What type of digital technology is being used in mathematics education during the COVID-19 pandemic? The study also provided a discussion on the implications that such digital technologies could have on research into the field of mathematics education and practice in addition to suggestions for future research directions on this topic. Interviews were chosen as techniques for the purpose of this research, which were undertaken with hundred and twenty mathematics teachers from different secondary schools in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The researcher found that 98% of participants believed that COVID-19 is the gateway for digital learning in mathematics education. In addition, 97% claimed that the use of online education by schools had expanded greatly following the coronavirus outbreak. This has resulted in various forms of software being used to facilitate communicate between teachers and students included mobile technologies, touchscreens and pen tablets, digital library and designing learning objects in mathematics education, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in mathematics, and computer algebra systems (CAS) such as Mathematical, Maple, MuPAD, MathCAD, Derive and Maxima.

Roles of technologies for future teaching in a pandemic: activity, agency, and humans-with-media

“…As shown in Tables 2 and 3 , PMTs assigned functions to technologies for the reorganization of classroom environments, of mathematical work in the classroom, and sometimes to recreate activities of conventional pre-pandemic teaching. This shows differences between technology agency as assigned by PMTs and its potential as documented for research in pre-pandemic teaching (Villa-Ochoa & Suárez-Téllez, 2021 ; Hillmayr et al, 2020 ; Erens & Eichler, 2018) and during the pandemic (Alabdulaziz, 2021 ; Naidoo, 2020 ). Similarly to results reported by Alabdulaziz ( 2021 ) and Naidoo ( 2020 ), in our study, the PMTs recognized that the pandemic created conditions for technology to remain in the educational process permanently; however, unlike these studies, our results reinforce the need to transcend a simple positive perception and to recognize the agency of technology and how it could be integrated into curricula and school context conditions.…”

An Analysis of the Online Final Examination Items for Ninth-graders in the Mathematics Course Using the Rasch Measurement Model

“…The Covid-19 pandemic has made the world educational institutions to conduct learning online [31], [32]. This situation made Indonesia stop the national examinations, causing each school to prepare its final examination items for determining the students' graduation.…”

Digital Literacy Skills for Exam-Oriented, Pandemic Schooling: A Mixed Methods Study of Students’ Authentic Performance

“…In addition, Alabdulaziz (2021) found that in Saudi Arabian mathematics education, mobile technologies, pen tablets and touchscreens had become popular hardware; and computer algebra systems, digital libraries and massive open online courses had become popular software. In American and British literacy education, there are cases where audiovisual recording and editing software and annotation software have become popular to support new practices such as virtual journaling and multimodal texts (Chamberlain, Lacina, Jimerson, Payne & Zingale (2020).…”