How to Build on Arab Speaking Students’ Positive Experiences: Emergency Remote Learning during the Covid-19 Pandemic and into the Future of Learning

According to the United Nations, UNESCO (2020), the Covid19 pandemic has caused the greatest disruption to education in memorable history. School closures impacted 94% of the world’s student population in 190 countries. In the Middle East, campus closures started in March 2020 when the spread of the pandemic was deemed a serious health risk. By the end of April 2020 college students in the UAE found themselves attending rapidly deployed on-line video classes. However, Al Lily et al. (2020) note that countries around the world have not worked together on how to implement emergency remote learning and this has resulted in potential local differences in effectiveness. This paper centers specifically on Arab learners at a college in the U.A.E. and their response to emergency on-line learning. This study focuses on two surveys carried out as a longitudinal research project looking at changes in student confidence and happiness with on-line learning between May 2020 and October 2021. In the 2020 survey, students indicated concern about their ability to succeed, a point commonly reflected in other early student surveys. However, as time passed and students became comfortable with online learning, their confidence and happiness has improved dramatically as indicated in the October 2021 survey data. However, the 2021 survey also incidentally discovered the absence of a significant body of students as compared to the 2020 survey. These two finding are important in order to plan for what needs to happen going forward. In particular, we need to understand how remote teaching has affected students from different backgrounds differently.