Abstract
Emergency remote teaching, on the one hand, constitutes the ground for equality of opportunity for students; but on the other hand, it can result in inequality becoming even more pronounced for disadvantaged groups. This chapter aims to present anecdotal evidence of inequalities from the perspectives of students, educators, parents, support personnel, and administrators during pandemic in Turkey. The study is based on the embedded single-case design and was applied with a total of 250 participants. According to the findings, lack of hardware, and/or issues of an infrastructural nature were some of the most cited forms of inequality. The stakeholders also noted problems having been experienced during live sessions, unclear measurement and evaluation grading systems, and educational materials applied to students with disabilities as forms of inequality. For the future of the next generation, there is a requirement for conscious state policies to be developed and implemented during the upcoming period as countries attempt to deal with the ongoing pandemic crisis.
TopIntroduction
COVID-19 appeared suddenly and rapidly swept across the globe from the end of 2019 through the first few months of 2020. At that point, the term “distance education” became used on a daily basis, whereas previously it may have only been a term known with regards to the “distance” concept. Field experts reacted instantly to the unfolding crisis and began to refer to this new form of education, which was far removed from the realities of actual formalized “distance education” as “emergency remote teaching,” with many different groups such as students, teachers, and administrators having started to use “Zoom,” “MS Teams,” and “Perculus Plus1,” for the delivery of live lessons, as well as other similar applications, without any real fundamental understanding of what it really was or how to use it effectively or efficiently.
While the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic forced many countries into some form of societal lockdown, some opted to await the development of social viral immunity with a less restrictive approach. The effective closure of most countries towards the end of March 2020 necessitated urgent sectoral solutions, with most forced to overturn operating policies that were previously considered near impossible to accept in principle, let alone adopt. The education sector was inevitably forced towards the necessity of choosing digitalization as a means of operation which, according to one leading international source, coupled with a lack of Internet access for all, forced 1.5 billion children into being de facto excluded from education, with 180 countries having enforced school closures on a national level (World Food Programme, Food and Agriculture, Organization of the United Nations, & United Nations Children’s Fund, 2020). However, due to the profound differences in access to online education, the United Nations Development Program (2020) estimated that 86% of primary school children were excluded from education in low income countries. “March 2020 will forever be known in the education community as the month when schools shut their doors almost all over the world. These global school closures will be remembered as a historically unprecedented month,” according to Audrey Azoulay, Executive Director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (Winthrop, 2020).
As a result of the pandemic, some 50 million school-aged children attending school in the United States alone were suddenly unable to attend school (DeMatthews et al., 2020). In British Columbia, a geographically and socially diverse province in the west of Canada, 44,000 teachers and almost 600,000 students were said to have been affected during the pandemic (Hyslop, 2020). Some countries, such as Japan, closed down schools without any immediate alternative available; whereas, neighboring China immediately swapped over to online learning as an alternative to classroom-based education (Rich et al., 2020). Zhang et al. (2020) described an emergency policy initiative called “Suspend Classes without Stopping Learning” that was launched by the Chinese Ministry of Education in their mission to transform teaching interventions into a largescale online teaching solution when schools were abruptly closed to face-to-face education. Belize, a small country situated between Mexico and Guatemala which realizes the majority of its income from tourism, was severely impacted in economic terms by the sudden onset of the global pandemic; and as a result, the services offered to teachers and students were severely restricted (Kirshner, 2020).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Distance Education: Time-in/dependent (when necessary) mass education delivered irrespective of location that provides physically distant learners and educators the means to interact through the use of appropriate instructional methods, techniques, and strategies, and which employs various media to deliver planned and structured learning experiences according to students’ individual needs.
Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT): (In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic) A sudden interim shift of instructional delivery to an online environment, as made mandatory by national/local authority decree due to the temporary suspension of face-to-face education.
Inequality: Unequal in quantity, ranking, value or degree; unfairness.
Learning Management System (LMS): An online system (of varying types), that allows for the common delivery of classes within an online environment, the tracking and reporting of student performance. An LMS may often be integrated with other systems so as to enable teachers and learners to meet virtually (online) either synchronously or asynchronously, and may also include numerous interactive tools that can facilitate the setting and receiving of homework, exams, plus forums and live lessons.
Live Lessons: Education classes conducted via online video-conferencing software embedded within an LMS, or used standalone with additional features such as shared webcam or screen access, file sharing, chat, whiteboard, questionnaires, and annotations in order that students and teachers can communicate simultaneously.
Education Information Network: (Known as “Egitim Bilisim Agi” in Turkish, or EBA). This serves as Turkey’s national digital education platform for K-12 state education, established and maintained by the Turkish Ministry of National Education.
Online Learning: It is a part of asynchronous or / and simultaneous formal or informal learning processes where students receive educational courses or materials; students and educators interact together; access knowledge and gain teaching experiences via connection to the Internet.
Inequality in Education: Inability to receive education under equal conditions with peers due to disadvantages linked to ethnicity, socioeconomic status, language, physical and/or psychological disability; lack of students’ ownership of, or access to, technological devices, Internet access, Internet quota, etc.; lack of qualified teaching personnel, time, interest, or parental support, etc.
Synchronous Learning: Teaching and learning processes applied by educators for learners and held at the same time using live video-conferencing application or other communication tools.