Abstract
The abrupt transitions to online teaching during COVID-19 have exacerbated educational discrepancies worldwide. South Korean schools faced similar challenges primarily due to the insufficient infrastructure and pedagogical guidelines for online teaching. This mixed-method case study investigated how Korean K-12 teachers and administrators converted to online teaching and addressed related digital equity issues during their first semester of online teaching in response to the pandemic. Interviews, as well as survey responses at the beginning and end of the semester, were analyzed through Activity Theory (AT) and Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) frameworks. The study's key insights were that the digital equity issue is related to quality teaching issues beyond infrastructural problems and that teachers took various strategies to maximize the effectiveness of their blended teaching. We aim to shed light on supporting equitable online learning and sustaining positive changes in the post-COVID era.
Highlights
The unexpected school closures during the COVID-19 crisis exacerbated educational discrepancies worldwide, significantly affecting underprivileged students who lack technological, educational, and parental support for online and blended learning (Masonbrink & Hurley, 2020)
The results address the two research questions: how teachers and administrators addressed digital equity problems and how they transitioned to online teaching
Among the difficulties that were not coded with Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK), teachers most commonly expressed their frustration with the complexity and inconsistency of the governmental regulations
Summary
The unexpected school closures during the COVID-19 crisis exacerbated educational discrepancies worldwide, significantly affecting underprivileged students who lack technological, educational, and parental support for online and blended learning (Masonbrink & Hurley, 2020). At the beginning of the outbreak, many public schools in underfunded districts lacked digital devices and networks to support online learning (Choi, 2020). As the COVID-19 cases started to drop, Korean K-12 schools partially reopened in June 2020, being forced to transition to a blended teaching model, where students attend remote and on-campus classes alternatively every other week. This model is expected to last until the end of the outbreak, the transition again was abrupt and did not allow teachers to prepare for the unique challenges of blended teaching. Some teachers could only provide links to educational videos created by the government due to their lack of digital literacy, which disengaged students, especially those who lacked motivation and parental support (Yoo, 2020)
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