Webinar Technology: Developing Teacher Training Programs for Emergency Remote Teaching amid COVID-19

Abstract

In the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools worldwide are compelled to find new ways of providing education to their students. Educational institutions are shifting to emergency E-learning, while their underprepared teachers find themselves confronted with numerous unexpected challenges of emergency remote teaching (ERT). Teachers are not fully prepared and professionally trained to teach through ERT, while they also struggle with the challenges that arise from the lack of readiness for an abrupt transition from conventional curriculum to online-based curriculum. To mitigate the dilemma that the teachers experience in delivering instruction amid COVID-19, educational institutions switched to digital technologies to empower the teachers as frontline workers during the pandemic. As a result, the teachers in most countries throughout the world are undergoing training through webinar technology. Holding webinars to train the teachers can pave the way to address the challenges in remote teaching while simultaneously preventing the spread of the novel coronavirus.