Online Challenges

      Lebanon is a country with an economic crisis from 2019. And like any other country in the world, it is passing through the Covid-19 pandemic. These two big issues change the way of delivering knowledge and information from face to face learning to distance learning. Thus, many challenges could occur when learning or teaching online.

     The first challenge is the sudden shift to distance learning and the need to acquire new skills without adequate support. Then, the absence of a national training strategy to support principals and teachers. Next, the lack of an accessible to- all platform that provides high- quality education. As a result, teachers in Lebanon are not prepared for the change from traditional teaching to online teaching using digital devices and technology. The students, as well as their parents are not well trained, and they don’t have enough experience in using technology. So, the parents are not pedagogically qualified to teach their kids. Another challenge is the financial burden on parents for securing school fees and materials. Therefore, some families don’t have enough devices for all their kids, preventing some students from attending online classes and studying.

     Moreover, due to the Lebanese situation, there is an absence of support such as free internet connection, computers and electricity. Thus, our community is suffering from cutting in electricity and even network, so not all the students have access to online class at the same time. The connection will put the student in anxiety, especially if they have a formal or informal assessment.

     In addition, the teachers or parents do not observe students during online assessments; this will make cheating easy for the students looking for an easy way to succeed. Cheating will make summative and formative evaluations not valid and not reliable. At last, young children are not aware of keeping their private information, which creates an easy target for hackers.