Finding a Silver Lining in the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case of a Teachers' Online Community in Georgia

Introduction

In December 2019, the World Health Organisation (WHO) identified a new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which soon caused the global COVID-19 pandemic. By August 2021, it had infected over 216 million people worldwide, resulting in nearly 4.5 million deaths (WHO, 2021; Zhao & Watterston, 2021). At the time of writing this paper, we are still witnessing the shock and disruption caused by the pandemic.

Social distancing measures were introduced in different countries and jurisdictions, followed by national lockdowns in many places. Schools, universities and other educational organisations were forced to close worldwide. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), more than 1.59 billion learners around the world could not attend schools and universities and 194 countries shut down their educational institutions due to COVID-19 during the peak on 3 April 2020 (UNESCO, 2020a). This situation created a need and set the context for Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) (Hodges et al., 2020), using different types of high or low-tech solutions.

The necessitated unprecedented uptake of educational technologies has implications on different levels of education in the immediate, medium, and long term, including on teachers’ professional development. On the one hand, in light of the clear urgency for the reorganisation of teaching and learning processes, synchronous ERT became the leading paradigm in response to the sudden transformational need (Eradze et al, 2021). On the other, many teachers had to start experimenting with educational technologies while having little to no experience. Different countries and institutions dealt with the sudden changes in their own way (Albó et al., 2020; Bozkurt et al., 2020).

Georgia became one of the first countries in Europe to close down its schools on 2 March 2020. Unaware of how long the pandemic would last, some schools switched to online teaching instantly, while others awaited further instructions. Guidelines, normative basis, and recommendations from the Ministry of Education and Science (MES) followed later. Among other guidance, they recommended schools to use the Microsoft (MS) Teams platform and provided log-in credentials to all teachers and students (Agenda.ge, 2020). On the one hand, although they were only recommendations, some schools took this very seriously and requested their teachers to only use Teams. Perhaps, this made it easy for teachers who followed the rule, but some complained via social media that they were not given the freedom to use digital tools of their choice. On the other hand, this specific recommendation was explained by the need to ease the reorganization and the management of technical assistance.

Qualitative research conducted by the Young Teachers’ Union (2020) revealed that some teachers only used Facebook Messenger for online lessons. Their respondents reported that Teams was a complicated software and they had a hard time learning how to use it, even with IT support available. Some teachers could not even access their accounts at all. The respondents also named internet connection problems as a reason for not using the platform. According to statistics provided by the Education Management Information System (EMIS), between 15 March and 15 June, around 126 522 school students (from a total of 528 486) and 4 404 teachers (from a total of 52 060) never logged into their MS accounts (Publika, 2020).

A local alternative platform Feedc Edu was created weeks after the school closure. It was a free service, aimed to ease online communication between teachers and students, even with slow internet connections. (MES, 2020b). However, the platform did not gain momentum, and one year later, the website became inaccessible.