Emergency remote teaching in Greece during the first period of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

During the first period of the covid-19 pandemic, schools in Greece suspended the face-to-face operation for about three months, and teachers were called in an emergency to adjust the teaching methods remotely. The educational community was called to deal with this emergency with the primary goal to maintain students’ contact with the educational process. The urgent use of distance communication and teaching forms was a project with many difficulties for teachers, students, and parents. In all this transition process, the practice and learning communities that teachers themselves organized were crucial. The Greek eTwinning community immediately implemented three MOOC seminars (Mass Open Online Courses), which were designed to assist them in the use and pedagogical utilization of distance education tools. More than 30,000 teachers participated in these seminars. In this paper, we present the results of a survey conducted on a sample of 1080 Greek teachers, members of the eTwinning community, and we describe how they dealt with remotely teaching. The research refers to tools used, the distance communication content, and the difficulties encountered to implement the whole project.