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The outbreak of COVID-19 has had an unprecedented impact on education systems worldwide. There have been varied international responses to this public health crisis, mostly reactionary. According to a report by UNESCO (2020), the COVID-19 Pandemic has entailed the most extensive disruption to the education system in history, affecting 94% of the world's student population in more than 190 countries.
Given the rapidly evolving nature of the outbreak, governments must adapt their countries’ responses continually and with little to no clarity on the duration for which the restrictions must be imposed. School closures since February 2020 due to Coronavirus (COVID-19) have affected students, teachers, and working parents. According to UNESCO (2020), more than 100 countries have implemented nationwide closures, negatively impacting more than half of the world’s student population and their educational attainment. The closure resulted in an immediate and rapid transition to distance-learning solutions across most educational institutions all around the globe. Consequently, it is essential for school systems to quickly implement remote teaching and learning, which caused significant changes in the conventional instructional practices leading to the transition from traditional face-to-face learning to online learning from home.
One of the highly autonomous instructional contexts afforded to students and teachers during the Pandemic is Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) (Hodges, Moore, Lockee, Trust & Bond, 2020), a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternate delivery model because of the COVID-19 crisis. In contrast to the learning experiences initially planned to be online, ERT involves using fully remote teaching solutions for instruction that would otherwise be delivered face-to-face or as blended or hybrid courses and is likely to switch over to the face-to-face format once the crisis or emergency has ended. The primary objective is to provide temporary access to instruction and instructional supports that can be quickly implemented and readily available during an emergency or crisis.
The shift to ERT requires that faculty to be more engaged in the course design, development, and implementation processes and that students learn independently, can manage learning resources, and strategize the learning process. The Pandemic’s abrupt spread forced institutions to switch to distance education or postpone education indefinitely (Khanfar, 2020). In response to the sudden global health conditions, MOE in Saudi Arabia launched a virtual E-school platform called “Madrasati,” or “My School” in Arabic, with a business model that highly simulates the in-person school model and provides teachers and students with a learning experience relatively comparable to the face-to-face experience.