Abstract:

The role of technology in education has been further amplified as the world goes through the nuts and bolts of dealing with an unprecedented global pandemic. Overnight, and out of need and not interest, teachers and professors around the world went into full educational technology professional development mode with minimal planning. Considering the uncharted territory, an extensive research movement commenced with researchers trying to document and investigate challenges, solutions, impact, and lessons learned from the emergency remote teaching process. The purpose of the current project is to systematically review the body of literature that was published since the start of the pandemic and that investigates issues related to education under these stressful times. To be able to scope the literature, a comprehensive literature search was conducted including the following data-bases: ERIC, Education Source, Academic Search, Complete Communication Abstracts, Communications & Mass Media Complete, Business Source Complete, PsycINFO, ProQuest Central, ProQuest, Dissertations & Theses Global, Web of Science. The search revealed 3867 unique articles that have been published in 2020 (January to December) that focus on education during the pandemic time. A review of the abstracts followed by full text review, resulted in the identification of 2035 articles that meet the criteria for this current project. Study features to be coded for the 2035 documents include: paper type, author affiliation, participants, teaching model, grade level, subject matter, geographic region(s), main message/issue/concern, research objective, delivery mode, performance outcome measure, attitude/motivation outcome measure, wellbeing outcome measure, pedagogical framework, number of participants, duration of study, technology used, training in technology use for teacher, and training in technology use for students. The paper will provide the initial analysis from the systematic review pertaining to technology use in particular. It will also provide reflections and lessons learned while shedding light on the main issues that teachers are facing as they work on meeting their students' needs.

Keywords:

Emergency remote learning, systematic review, educational technology.