Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning: Digital Competencies and Pedagogical Transformation in Resource-Constrained Contexts

1. Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented disruption to education systems worldwide, resulting in the closure of schools, colleges and universities in most countries (Shohel et al., 2021a; Shohel et al., 2021b; Shohel et al., 2022). Lockdown and social distancing demonstrated the difficulty of dealing with teaching and learning in education in emergencies (EiE). Many countries around the world closed educational institutions nationally to discourage or prevent the spread of the virus by maintaining social distance. To limit the spread of the virus and render the continuation of education, the predominant model used for education delivery in remote and online schooling, i.e. transforming all educational activities ranging from in-class teaching and learning activities to assessments online. This unpredicted situation significantly impacts education, especially the learning of millions of children and adolescents (Shohel et al., 2022). It has led to the largest disruption of all levels of education systems in history, affecting nearly 1.6 billion learners in more than 190 countries across the globe (United Nations, 2020). While technology came to play an essential role in assisting the continuity of education to some extent (Ferri, Grifoni and Guzzo, 2020), the challenges remain in transforming teaching and learning in remote format due to the incompetencies of relevant digital literacy of staff and students as well as the nature of the learning environment, which is often resource-constrained. Therefore, this chapter firstly explores different factors that distinguish education in emergencies, emergency remote learning and online distance learning followed by identifying the gaps of digital competencies for remote online education in emergencies. Moreover, this chapter provides different digital competency models for EiE and discusses various factors that are required to consider and/or adapt for pedagogical transformation in emergencies within the resource-constrained environment.