Once exposed, the COVID-19 pandemic created unprecedented pressure on all sectors causing many temporarily closures and organizations working from home. Daily norms were interrupted and further complicated with the declaration of quarantine curfews worldwide. One major sector which has been greatly impacted is the education sector. Due to the nature of its complicated infrastructure, all stakeholders were heavily affected as the world turned to online learning for solutions. By doing so, many educational institutes were able to continue with their teaching, even with strict social distancing measures in place. Although remote learning is not a new concept in the education sector, it is a new concept in Kuwait. In this chapter, a thorough review is given on the strategy which Kuwait's universities adopted as they prepared for distance learning for the first time throughout the country. Khan's 8-element VLE model will be used as a reference.
TopVirtual Learning Environments (Vle)
A Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is a software-based system which enables teachers to manage various educational courses online in one place (Thorsteinsson, 2013; AlQudah, 2014). Onlnie Learning Management Systems (LMS) such as the Moodle platform are types of VLE (Awang et al., 2019). E-Learning, now a widely used term, refers to learning remotely by means of technology and electronic devices to access the educational curriculums outside the conventional classroom (AlQudah, 2014; Elkaseh et al., 2015; Otto & Becker, 2019;eLearningNC.gov, 2020). It may refer to a course, diploma and/or degree program which is delivered online either completely or through a hybrid strategy. There are variable names which are used to describe online learning like distance education program, online learning, web-based learning, mobile learning, nomadic learning, distance learning and so on (Khan, 2001; Bjørke, 2011). E-Learning has proven to be successful in various levels of education and has become a widely accepted way of education particularly during this year’s Covid-19 outbreak (Elkaseh et al., 2015). The recent pandemic has led to great changes in modes of social interaction and education (Murphy, 2020).
VLE is simply a platform that allows students and teachers to interact, present and share resources/activities with one another to complete an entire online course or have been used as a supporting feature in traditional teaching courses (Mosquera, 2017). VLE’s main goal is to manage, motivate and ease the learning experience of students (Sneha & Nagaraja, 2013). According to Morais et al.(2017), “the main potentiality of VLEs is the provision of a set of tools aiming to support the production and distribution of contents, communication, and the assessment of the teaching and learning process” (p. 518). In addition, authors like Barker and Gossman (2013) also claimed that “VLEs boast a wide spectrum of research showing positive impacts across different contexts” (p. 22). To support the above statement, Dahlstrom et al. (2014) research showed that VLEs produce positive change in the learning experience within higher education, which is also supported by Morais et al. (2017) by concluding in their research that students’ performance were quite positive with accessing and using VLEs platforms within their education. Other advantages of using VLE platforms include: