Shifting to Emergency Remote Teaching Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Investigation of Greek Teachers’ Beliefs and Experiences

Abstract

During schools' closure, due to the pandemic of COVID-19, teachers around the globe were forced to transfer their instruction on-line. They were facing a range of barriers and difficulties to plan and provide online remote teaching to their students. This paper reports on a study exploring Greek primary and secondary education teachers' views about emergency remote teaching and elearning. The survey conducted in May 2020, just after schools' reopening in Greece. A total of 694 K-12 teachers responded to an online questionnaire. The preliminary findings of data analysis showed that the majority of the participants perceived the pandemic as a turning point with regards to the role of digital technologies and e-learning in the schools. On the other hand, we identified teachers' needs for professional development and support, in terms of learning design abilities necessary to integrate synchronous and asynchronous learning in both, online and physical, classrooms.

Greek teachers' resilience levels during the COVID‐19 pandemic lockdown and its association with attitudes towards emergency remote teaching and perceived stress

“…By contrast, their relationships with colleagues were neutral and their relationships with students and parents slightly negative. These findings confirm the findings reported by similar studies conducted in Greece which concluded that Greek teachers had managed to respond successfully to the challenge of delivering their courses through asynchronous and synchronous modes but, at the same time, without maintaining the envisaged relationships with colleagues and students (Jimoyiannis et al, 2021;Nikiforos et al, 2020).…”

“…At a later stage, they adopted synchronous forms of distance teaching with technical problems such as limited resources, limited support for children at home and limited experience of using information communication technology emerging as important obstacles to overcome (Nikolopoulou, 2022 ). Similar results were reported by studies on the practices of primary and secondary school teachers; despite struggling initially with implementing distance education, they subsequently rose to the challenge of catering effectively for their students (Jimoyiannis et al, 2021 ; Nikiforos et al, 2020 ). Moreover, these studies highlighted the teachers' perceived needs for professional development and support.…”

“…To sum up, despite having been afforded opportunities for training on the use of ICT technology, there is overwhelming evidence that Greek teachers faced significant difficulties in their transition to “emergency remote teaching”. The term “emergency remote teaching” has been recently coined (Hodges et al, 2020 cited in Jimoyiannis et al, 2021) to describe the shift of providing education through distant learning modes due to crisis circumstances and is considered to be giving rise to substantial occupational stress for the teaching workforce.…”

Online Mathematics Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Didactic Strategies, Educational Resources, and Educational Contexts

“…In the case of domestic resources, it can be seen that the majority of educators who use emerging strategies make use of these, unlike those who use traditional strategies. These findings are related to the idea that educators had to go beyond the curricula and reorient content to students' homes to maximize understanding [50]. Likewise, this idea of reinterpreting the home as a type of educational context revisits the idea of selfdirected learning in which students focus on their situational experience for learning with concrete materials.…”

The Disadvantages of Distance Education Implementation, During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Greek Teachers’ Opinions

“…Therefore, these two teaching conditions cannot be identified as one and the same. Thus, many researchers point out that it is better to use the term «emergency distance teaching» (Jimoyiannis, Koukis & Tsiotakis, 2021).…”