The challenging aspects of digital learning objects usage in a primary school during the pandemics

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic situation forced to look for other ways to provide continuous education around the world, which highlighted the importance and necessity of online education platforms and digital learning object (DLO) while going through this shift (Zhou et al., 2020; Viner et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020). Teachers, in primary schools as well, had to reorganize completely their curriculum and assignments to adapt them to the virtual environment. This paper, based on the experiences of primary school teachers, aims to reveal the challenges faced by the teachers when within two weeks all Lithuanian schools and universities had to switch to remote education from face-to-face education and when the adoption of DLOs moved from optional to compulsory ‘mode’as learning process became remote. The research problem is analyzed primarily by revealing the theoretical aspects of the research, i.e., the concept of the DLO, the specifics of the adoption of DLOs in primary education and the challenges considered through the types of barriers. The findings indicate that teachers experienced challenges of practical training, issues in pupils’ assessment due to the lack of participation in the process of assignment completion, time constrain, different computer systems used, issues of online security, internet access and support. The study also identified the challenges of practical origin, namely, difficulties in keeping pupils’ concentration and attention throughout the lesson, lower level of teacher’s control during lessons as well as differences in pupils’ technical skills to use computers.