Abstract:

Until the COVID-19 pandemic, teaching at different levels and lifelong education of teachers were based essentially on face-to-face modality. Moreover, the current pandemic situation has added new challenges in the methodologies, increase the use of technology in the teaching-learning process through the need of being remotely. However, this also promotes the search for new paths by teachers and students supported by available resources.

Given the pandemic context, the Portuguese entity responsible for the Lifelong Education of teachers, the Scientific-Pedagogical Council for Continuing Education at the University of Minho, allowed remote training in March 2020, for all training actions in progress or that started until 31 July 2020. In this context, training activities took place at the Polytechnic Institute of Guarda Training Center, with the participation of teachers from the kindergarten, all cycles of basic and secondary education from all over Portugal.

The aim of this work is to study the new reality of lifelong education of teachers and teaching remotely in pandemic situation. In order to achieve this goal, a questionnaire survey was developed and the participation of teachers, who did training activities at Polytechnic Institute of Guarda Training Center, was requested. This work analyses teachers' perception about lifelong education and teaching remotely in the pandemic situation. From the results, almost all respondents reported that they would undertake more training activities remotely, pointing out the advantage that it doesn’t require travel and mentioned the disadvantage of the lack of personal contact. Highlight that the majority of participants taught remotely during the period of the academic year 2019/2020 affected by the pandemic, consider that this modality is more difficult and showing preference for face-to-face education.

Keywords:

Lifelong education, teaching-learning methodologies, pandemic.