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The Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has already had a significant disruptive impact on the society, posing challenges to the provision of education across the world. Due to this crises governments over the world have temporarily closed educational institutions to help reduce the spread of COVID-19. Accordingly, educational institutions are deploying innovative emergency remote teaching (ERT) and virtual learning (VL) approaches for students to study at home. Digital technologies are being employed as a positive response to COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this study draws on existing literature and theories of online learning and change management to provide evidence on the state of art of ERT and VL.

This current study employs a systemic review of 53 sources to provide descriptive analysis leveraging on secondary sources from the literature and document reports on theories of online learning and change management, COVID-19, pandemic, emergency remote teaching and virtual learning.

Findings from this study present the theories of online learning and change management and significance and challenges of adopting ERT and VL during the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, our findings present application platforms that are being deployed for the adoption of ERT and VL during and after COVID-19 pandemic. Lastly, the findings explore potential strategies as recommendations to be employed to improve current and future adoption of ERT and VL in educational institutions.

This study draws on existing literature and adds to existing body of knowledge by exploring the adoption of emergency remote teaching and virtual learning during and after COVID-19 pandemic. This study provides a timely guide on the potential of emergency remote teaching and virtual learning in higher education as a response to COVID-19 crises now and into the future. This study discusses the theories of online learning and change management and also offers recommendations to educationalists and policymakers in educational institutions on addressing the crisis.

During COVID 19 pandemic emergency remote teaching (ERT) in higher education emerged and faculty members had to go through a transformation in teaching-learning without preparedness. The purpose of the study is to understand the instructional delivery experiences of faculty members, explore the challenges and how they overcame these challenges during the transition from traditional classroom teaching to ERT.

A qualitative research approach using phenomenology is adapted for the study. The study is conducted in selected renowned government and private universities offering professional education in India, Malaysia, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Data analysis is using NVivo, data management software, based on Ricouer’s theory of interpretation.

The findings identify unique challenges and opportunities in faculty experiences during the implementation of ERT and universities require more preparedness in implementing a revised pedagogy. Addressing these unique challenges is, therefore, essential in effective change management and ensuring the effectiveness of instructional delivery.

The study comprises faculty experiences from only selected countries (the United Arab Emirates, Oman, India and Malaysia) and disciplines such as business studies, design and architecture, engineering, hospitality and tourism management, medicine and nursing. The research contributes towards change management and adaptability strategies during emergency transitions.

The study has implications in the field of education, administration, research and society at large. This is an era of change that has witnessed tremendous possibilities of digital technology in enhancing remote teaching and learning at all levels of education worldwide. The study enumerates the factors influencing the paradigm shift in the pedagogy for present and future higher education. The present study also highlights how challenging this transformation was to the lives of professional academics and emphasized how effectively the faculty need to be mentored for the future by the administration. Future research can envisage effective tools and techniques for strengthening professional education at universities. The social context and human experiences in ERT and their impact on the process of learning are also addressed in the study.

The study aims to understand the social context and human experiences in the process of ERT and their impact on the process of learning.

The findings of the study would throw light into the factors influencing the paradigm shift in the pedagogy for present and future higher education.

The study directs attention to the psychological conditions experienced and knowledge management practices leveraged by faculty in higher education institutes (HEIs) to cope with the shift to emergency remote teaching caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. By focusing attention on faculty experiences during this transition, this study aims to examine an under-investigated effect of the pandemic in the Indian context.

Interpretative phenomenological analysis is used to analyze the data gathered in two waves through 40 in-depth interviews with 20 faculty members based in India over a year. The data were analyzed deductively using Kahn’s framework of engagement and robust coding protocols.

Eight subthemes across three psychological conditions (meaningfulness, availability and safety) were developed to discourse faculty experiences and challenges with emergency remote teaching related to their learning, identity, leveraged resources and support received from their employing educational institutes. The findings also present the coping strategies and knowledge management-related practices that the faculty used to adjust to each discussed challenge.

The study uses a longitudinal design and phenomenology as the analytical method, which offers a significant methodological contribution to the extant literature. Further, the study’s use of Kahn’s model to examine the faculty members’ transitions to emergency remote teaching in India offers novel insights into the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on educational institutes in an under-investigated context.

The study aimed to examine the relationship between self-regulation failure and academic achievement in an emergency remote teaching (ERT) and learning environment compared to a face-to-face setting.

This study conducted an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) to investigate the impact of students falling behind (as proxy for self-regulation failure) on their final course mark. The sample comprised students from four undergraduate modules offered at a South African university in a face-to-face setting (N = 1,604), as well as an ERT setting (N = 1,478). Students falling behind were measured as the days behind, relative to the academic program, using learning management system (LMS) log data. The study further explored whether self-regulation failure had a greater effect on academic achievement in ERT as opposed to a face-to-face context.

The results indicated a negative correlation between self-regulation failure, evidenced by falling further behind in the academic program, and students' final course marks. Furthermore, the negative impact of falling behind was found to be greater on a student's final course mark during ERT compared to a face-to-face setting.

This study contributes to the literature on ERT by highlighting the increased negative effect of self-regulation failure on academic achievement in ERT as opposed to face-to-face teaching and learning. Findings of this research may be of value to educators and policymakers in identifying ways of supporting self-regulated learning in future ERT situations to ensure that academic success is maintained.

This study aims to examine how lecturers at a South African university navigated teaching and learning in the current educational landscape obscured by the global pandemic. The authors examine how lecturers employed a community of inquiry (CoI) in their online classrooms within the context of emergency remote teaching (ERT). The study further aims to ascertain students’ feedback concerning current ERT practices at the university toward cultivating a CoI. Doing this would offer more appropriate interventions and support for lecturers and students from, within and for an African context. If not, instructors might risk reproducing and perpetuating the same outdated pedagogies before the pandemic.

A mixed-method research design informed by a pragmatist paradigm was used. Primary data were collected from 40 lecturers at the university through online questionnaires of which 10 lecturers responded to e-mail interviews. The original CoI survey was distributed among 150 students in the Faculty of Education at the university.

The findings revealed that, despite the rushed and trial nature of the use of ERT, there were instances of a CoI among students. The findings further revealed that the majority of the lecturers were not adequately prepared for ERT as a result of limited experience with asynchronous and synchronous online teaching. There was evidence of an absence of a strong active teaching presence that was found to have negatively influenced the development of social and cognitive presences during ERT.

Only a single faculty at one university was selected in this single case.

The results of the study have significant implications for faculties and academic staff who are currently teaching online in response to the teaching challenges paused by the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings will assist lecturers in developing appropriate pedagogical intervention strategies to enhance strong and active teaching and social presences necessary for cultivating the cognitive presences among students during ERT.

This is one of the first empirical studies to explore the influence of ERT on the cognitive, social and teaching presences at a university in an African context. The findings and conclusion of the study are novel as they relate to the development of appropriate pedagogical practices and intervention strategies suitable for ERT in response to the current education crisis.

The study aims to probe into university instructors' reactions to adopting the remote online learning model brought by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The study investigates the instructors' perspectives, in the humanities and science classes, on the effectiveness of the emergency remote teaching (ERT) compared to face-to-face teaching.

The data for the study were compiled from the responses of 127 instructors representing two private universities in middle and northern Jordan. The sample included 66 faculty members in the humanities and 61 in the sciences. The instructors' responses were elicited through a Likert-type questionnaire consisting of 20 items.

The present study's findings have shown that online instruction is becoming more common despite the presence of some major challenges facing instructors. The results showed that the e-learning system seems to better suit the humanities courses compared to the sciences courses. The findings also showed that faculty members in the humanities are more satisfied with the effectiveness of the assessment tools utilized in the online courses than their colleagues in the sciences. In addition, humanities e-courses seem to provide a more interactive learning environment than e-courses in the sciences.

More training for instructors on how to design online course syllabi to ensure effective delivery is needed. Instructors need to develop ways to encourage students to interact in virtual e-classes to the same level as the on-ground classes. Instructors also need to adopt the “blended learning” system as a transitional stage before switching completely to online learning.

Different studies have investigated how COVID-19 has impacted education. The current study brings to light the perspectives of the Jordanian teaching staff on transitioning to ERT during the COVID-19 crisis taking into account the differences between humanities and sciences classes.

The Covid-19 period has led to defining changes in the teaching process. Therefore, it is essential to explore how teachers have approached these changes, what experiences they have gained and what they have tried to change. This study aims to elucidate how innovative practices were applied in teaching – which was influenced by emergency remote teaching (ERT) – and better understand teachers' experiences related to these practices.

The phenomenology design, a qualitative research model, was executed in the current study. Phenomenological inquiry aims to interpret people's experiences about a specific concept designated as a phenomenon. Creswell (2020) classified two types of phenomenology: interpretive and descriptive. Interpretive phenomenology was employed in the current study as researchers collected data from individuals experiencing the phenomenon, collected and interpreted the data via excluding their own experiences.

As a result of the data interpretation, four themes related to experiences of innovative teaching practices during ERT were discovered: interpretation of innovative teaching, innovative teaching practices, needs related to innovative teaching and challenges to innovative teaching. The categories related to the interpretation of innovative teaching include positive and negative interpretation. The categories related to the second theme, innovative teaching practices, consist of characteristics of innovative teachers and innovative teaching practices employed. The categories related to the third theme, needs related to innovative teaching, are the need for guidance, training and technological infrastructure. The categories related to the fourth and final theme, challenges to innovative teaching, are barriers related to the teacher, barriers related to the learner and those related to the environment.

This study discovered that for teachers to practice innovative teaching, they must develop themselves, keep up-to-date and develop lifelong learning skills. Hung and Li (2017) reached a similar conclusion to the findings of this study: teachers' professional development is positively related to innovative teaching skills at a high level. The participating teachers stated that they had to rapidly improve their technological competency. It is thought that teachers developing their technological competencies will contribute to both ERT and face-to-face education at the end of the Pandemic.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the lived experiences, challenges and coping mechanisms of lecturers during the emergency remote teaching (ERT) situation induced by the Covid-19 pandemic.

A case study on lecturers in colleges and universities in Penang, Malaysia is selected. A qualitative research approach is adopted with semi-structured interviews as the data-gathering tool. Purposive sampling is used for diversity in terms of gender, ethnicity, age, subject or discipline taught and teaching experience.

The findings are composed into four (4) themes – Theme 1: Lecturers down-shift to lower levels of satisfaction and well-being, Theme 2: Wide diversity of experience with various intervening variables, Theme 3: Lecturers accept and adapt toward the situation and Theme 4: Socialization is compromised.

Despite this being a case study on Malaysia, it is postulated that the findings and recommendations have global relevancy as ERT is a worldwide phenomenon.

Practical education management and public-policy implications are evident and recommendations are made based on the emergent themes.

The findings in the form of emergent themes have considerable social implications in terms of social sustainability of education practices and policies.

This research is novel as lecturers' experience of ERT in Malaysia has not been specifically addressed to date. Even though the fieldwork is conducted in Malaysia, the findings and recommendations have global relevancy.

Hungarian school communities also faced with the challenging situation posed by COVID-19 in March 2020. The transition to emergency remote teaching could be affected by many factors. The attitudes of educators are important as their decisions largely determined the methods of digital education. In the present study, 147 high school teachers and 58 academics’ data were analyzed. Academics were more likely to maintain interactions during their courses, and they preferred to make their own material for the lessons, while high-school teachers more often borrow material from pre-existing sources. The authors also found that the effect of self-efficacy on resilience is mediated through the intention to create teaching materials and through the willingness to adopt them as well. It can be concluded that the assistance cannot be one-dimensional, as teachers of different ages, with different IT competencies, teaching at different levels of education, teaching different subjects, have different needs and need to be supported in different ways.

While educational shifts in response to COVID-19 at the state, district and school-level may have been grounded in the best of intentions, these decisions may not fully respond to the everyday realities of teachers, parents, caregivers and students living within historically marginalized communities. In addition to evidence-based and pragmatic approaches to emergency remote teaching (ERT), there is also a need to understand the experiences of students and families living in urban and rural contexts, who in light of existing educational inequities, are being further exposed to inequitable access due to school closures and the abrupt shift to ERT. This paper aims to use a reflexive dialogic approach to explore these issues.

Drawing from a larger phenomenological study highlighting the lived experiences of families being impacted by emergency shifts in educational policy and practice, this paper presents a dialogue between two teacher-educators of color working directly with teachers and administrators in the K-12 system across urban and rural contexts. This dialogue acknowledges and interrogates inequitable educational practices exacerbated by the pandemic for marginalized communities, and the shared responsibility of supporting the most vulnerable students as they transition to ERT.

Reflecting across their local contexts, the authors highlight the importance of educational decision-making that centers the perspectives of families in local communities; develop both pedagogical and structural approaches to address educational inequities; and purposefully approach ERT to disrupt such inequities and move toward a vision of educational justice.

Broader implications of this discussion speak to the ever-widening divide between marginalized and dominant communities, which undergirds the and educational inequities that continue to threaten the academic achievement of all students.

As educational decision-makers imagine new pathways in the days ahead, this dialogue highlights the importance of keeping complex issues of educational inequity at the center of the conversation.