COVID-19 Enforced Shift to Distance Education: Readiness and Challenges

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced a worldwide revolution in our understanding of how to conduct education. International lockdowns were the catalyst for a global shift from traditional face-to-face learning to distance learning. This comparative study utilized a mixed method approach to investigate the readiness of Higher Education instructors and students and the challenges arising from the shift to distance education in two different Arab countries, Qatar and Jordan. Generally, the findings gleaned from the questionnaires (230 instructors and 551 students) revealed certain inconsistencies with the findings that emerged from the interviews (18 instructors and 38 students) in terms of both the level of readiness and the challenges faced. The results showed a substantial variation in instructors and students’ readiness at both participating universities. While factors like country, age, gender, specialization, years of experience/year in the program, and the number of online training courses prior to the COVID-19 epidemic proved to cause statistically insignificant differences in instructors and students’ readiness, variables including age, gender and prior experience in online courses were relatively influential for students in terms of the challenges they faced.

Investigation of Mechanical Engineering Academicians’ Use of Distance Education Technologies

“…Teachers should be able to organise interrelated information and resources correctly and present them to students; organise the tools to be used for communication effectively; and also support students in a way that facilitates their learning by working as a guide during the education process [7]. In addition, teachers should be attentive to possible problems that may occur in the Internet-based distance education process, be able to offer solutions when faced with a problem and provide technical support to students when necessary [2]. Determining the stage of the teacher dimension, which is one of them, is seen as a priority for the success of the educational projects that are considered to be implemented.…”