COVID-19 and the urge for digital environments transition in education: reflecting on the Portuguese experience

Περίληψη

With the outbreak of COVID-19, governments worldwide, including in Europe, have taken different actions with regard to the impact in education due to the containment procedures. In Portugal, to help learners and educators to continue with their education and training activities during this period, several measures were put in action, mainly connected with the transition to distance education, at all levels of education. Teachers were pushed to move to online communication with pupils, and to deliver contents and activities using different online tools. But the major problem is that although Portugal has a good internet network, yet some families lack computers/digital devices. On the other hand, many teachers are not still at ease working in digital contexts, lacking necessary skills. To help teachers, Universidade Aberta (Open University, Portugal) has collaborated with the Ministry of Education in a special online training for teachers to develop competences in the creation, design and organization of digital networked environments. In this text, we focus and reflect on these efforts and initiatives, thus presenting some of the Portuguese experiences carried out to address the educational transformations caused by COVID-19.