How the UAE has overcome the challenges it faced to continue education despite the Corona pandemic?

 

How the UAE has overcome the challenges it faced to continue education despite the Corona pandemic?

modified on Wednesday, 30 September 2020, 12:51 AM

 

Despite the spread of the Corona pandemic in the UAE, the educational process in schools has not stopped thanks to the availability of resources, the readiness of the infrastructure and additional approved budgets devoted to education. However, this does not hide the existence of challenges and difficulties facing the government in implementing its plan to continue the educational process. In this paper, we will shed light on these challenges and examine the approaches that the Emirati Ministry of Education has adopted to overcome these challenges and achieve the goal of continuous quality education for learners in the UAE.

 

The first challenge lies in the new educational environment for the student. Students now have to study from home, where they perform their work of participating and asking questions to teachers during classes, performing their daily duties and sitting for electronic exams. Nevertheless, students are unfamiliar with this new situation and need a great deal of support and guidance to learn how to take their online education seriously as if they were in the real physical classroom.

 

The second challenge has to do with new educational methods and tools that teachers have to master in order to effectively deliver quality standard education to their students. What teachers were accustomed to before the Corona pandemic like laptops, interactive smart boards and overhead projectors in a real classroom is now replaced by a wide range of computer software and educational platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Tig Tag, IBM, etc. Concepts like synchronous and asynchronous lesson delivery are quite new to teachers. Hence, the need for the ministry to invest time and effort to train teachers on these new methods through workshops attended by all teachers to raise their level in the field of educational platforms and use of technology in a completely new distance-education scenario.

 

The third challenge is related to parents. It was already a hard job for the ministry to guide parents through actively engaging in fulfilling their important and vital role as crucial partners in the educational process of their children. In the entirely new scenario of distance learning, this mission has become even harder. Parents need support as to how they are supposed to provide the right environment for students, follow their children in their studies remotely, communicate with teachers and school administration through WhatsApp, Telegram or other social media websites such as Instagram and Facebook. The ministry of education assigned teams to hold workshops for parents to deal with the new uprising dilemmas. Fortunately, parents have shown cooperation in this difficult period, which will have a positive long-term impact on the continuity of distance learning.

 

The UAE provision of a generous budget for education, the ultra-modern communication infrastructure, the Ministry of Education’s training programs for teachers and students on different educational platforms and the follow-up of parents to their children have had the greatest impact on the continuation of the education process in the UAE. It is only fair to say that the UAE has brilliantly succeeded where other countries stumbled and failed.