Covid-19 Awareness Game for Deaf Children

Serious games are gaining increasing interest as they have been found successful in learning. The use of serious games has been vastly accelerated in light of the current crisis of Covid-19 pandemic. In order to reduce the spread of the virus, Covid-19 information and preventive measures should be accessible for all. However, serious games implemented for delivering covid-19 awareness are mainly dedicated for person with normal development. A lack of interest to implement games for people with special needs is noted. For that, this paper presents a new serious game for deaf children aiming to raise their awareness about the precautions needed during the outbreak in funny way. The game is based on delivering covid-19 preventive measures based on sign language assistance. While playing, the player has to collect prevention objects and avoid collision with viruses to keep healthy and win the game. © 2021 IEEE.

The Deaf Experience in Remote Learning during COVID-19

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many children with hearing loss face many challenges in receiving a quality education. The lack of trained teachers, adequate technological devices, accessible materials and lessons, and home support are all barriers to learning for these children who must learn at distance without appropriate assistance. The main purpose of this paper is to identify these challenges and explore possible recommendations to make online distance learning more accessible to these children. © 2021 IEEE.

Investigating 5th-grade students' opinions and attitudes towards using an Arabic pedagogical agent

Due to covid-19, educational institutions all around the world resorted to e-learning regardless of the readiness of e-learning tools used or the students' attitude and readiness towards using them. In this paper, we developed a pedagogical conversational agent, which is an e-learning tool and considered as a solution for the lack of social interaction that e-learning suffers from, to know the attitude of 5th-grade students in an elementary school in Tunisia towards learning « Fractions» with the help of a pedagogical conversational agent as learning support. The attitude towards using the conversational agent was favorable with the suggestions of providing a more natural interaction that focuses on making the conversational agent have more personality and emotionally intelligent and making the conversations longer with including multi-media elements. © 2021 IEEE.

Remote special education during COVID-19: A combined bibliometric, content and thematic analysis

While massive research has been conducted to see how remote learning and teaching is conduct during the COVID-19 pandemic, less focus has been paid on remote special education for students with disabilities. Therefore, it is still not clear how those students learned and what types of challenges they faced. To fill this gap, this study first collected data from the literature via a systematic literature review, and from both 51 teachers and 21 students with disabilities who were involved in this remote teaching and learning experiences via surveys. It then conducted bibliometric, content and thematic analysis to draw conclusions. The obtained findings highlighted that online and offline remote teaching methods from home were applied. Additionally, different learning assessment methods, such as mini-projects and simple quizzes were adopted by teachers to assess the gained knowledge of students remotely, but none of these methods relied on emerging technologies, such as big data and learning analytics. Finally, parents were a core actor to maintain remote learning from home for students with disabilities. © 2021 IEEE.

Framework for Teacher Support During Remote Teaching in a Crisis: COVID-19, as a Case Study

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many universities have decided to apply remote teaching in order to ensure the continuity of teaching and learning, as well as the safety of their students, teachers, and employees. However, not all teachers were prepared to go through this experience, and many of them have faced several challenges while teaching remotely. Therefore, this paper presents the most significant challenges that teachers may face during remote teaching and a number of proposed solutions for them. Two methods were used to identify these challenges as well as their proposed solutions, namely a comprehensive literature review and experts’ feedback. Additionally, this paper presents a framework for teacher support during times of crisis. The proposed framework can be referred by universities and teachers to facilitate remote teaching in the future, especially in times of crisis. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Remote Special Education During Crisis: COVID-19 as a Case Study

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, face-to-face teaching was banned, and more than one billion students did not return to school. While both teachers and students found themselves in a very challenging situation as they both need to quickly adapt to remote teaching and learning respectively, students with disabilities found themselves in even more difficult situations. This might be because they lack several assistive technologies at home that facilitate the learning process. The World Health Organization (WHO) pointed out that special attention should be paid to people with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this study investigates the applied remote teaching methods of students with disabilities, as well as the faced challenges. In this context, a survey was created and sent out to several stakeholders (pedagogues, teachers, school directors, etc.) that are directly involved in special education to collect their inputs. Finally, based on the collected experiences, this study presents recommendations and best practices to facilitate remote teaching in crisis for students with disabilities. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.