UAE-based Teachers’ Hindsight Judgments on Physics Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The learning situation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) education sector changed with the onset of COVID-19 in the country, with the number of cases rising to 52,600 locally by July 6, 2020. UAE became one of the few countries to not close schools. However, the UAE education system is now undergoing a transition from face-to-face classroom learning to online learning. A survey was conducted to examine the views of teachers with regard to the benefits and challenges of online education, including their retrospective experiences after four months of online teaching. Inferential statistics were used to analyze the findings. Utilizing online physics lessons to gauge learning outcomes. The results indicate that teachers in both the public and private school systems benefited from online learning but with a comparative advantage for the public-school teachers. The findings suggest that the two cohorts faced challenges with online learning in both the systems, with more significant effects on public school teachers as compared to private school teachers.