As reported by the UN, the COVID-19 pandemic has touched almost 1.5 billion students forcing school cessations in 191 countries, changing the daily-routine of over 63 million teachers. While UNESCO and partners launched the Global Educational Coalition to produce solutions to “make digital learning more inclusive,” aiming at helping countries to gather resources to implement “remote education through hi-tech, low-tech and no-tech approaches,” a lot of actors have been holding webinars on the educational challenges and dimension of the pandemic, with participants enrolled from all over the world, from East to West.The European Association for International Education, through its EAIE Community Moment and EAIE Webinar Academy organized virtual meetings on a range of subjects, COVID19 response, mobilities and international students’ recruitment, the regional Francophone center for Central and Eastern Europe organized webinars on how to teach online the Francophonie today, the Electronic Platform for Adult Learning in Europe has constantly published updates on distant learning tools or MOOCs courses.While the webinars discuss strategies to maintain education continuity, considering children and young people in need, presenting to professors and educators a wide variety of tools, there are quite a few discussing the pedagogy of online education. Although educators have been sharing debates and exchanging opinions in reference to the e-learning platforms for more than ten years now, this very situation made them found themselves obliged to embrace, at last, the distant online learning. So, from hypothetical, theoretical, or, in some happy cases, complementary mode of e-learning platform teaching and learning, we quickly moved to the reality that imposed immediate response, within modern technology tools’ use in order to make our students carry on with their studies. And here comes the real challenge! Moving to the e-learning platforms does not mean relocating your lesson from the textbook to an educational e-learning platform, but rather translating pedagogy strategy into tool-adapted, computer-assisted online education that shall surely ease our task to reach the proposed objectives, if we are opened to change! In this paper, we will address these issues based on our teaching experience through the pandemic.
A CONSTRUCTIVIST APPROACH TO ONLINE TRAINING FOR ONLINE TEACHERS
