Educator's Roles in Responding to COVID-19: The WeCWI's Perspective

COVID-19 spread rapidly globally and was declared a pandemic by WHO on 11 March 2020. According to UNESCO, the nationwide closures of schools and other educational institutions by mid-April 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has affected over 1.57 billion learners (over 90% of the world’s total enrolled student population) and at least 63 million primary and secondary teachers alone. The global lockdown of education institutions due to the COVID-19 pandemic has caused teaching and learning to move online on a massive scale, which many educators may be overwhelmed and unprepared to do their jobs well. Loss in learning happens if educators cannot cope with the interruptions.

One of the outcomes from the UNESCO's International Commission on the Futures of Education meeting on 8 April 2020 to reflect on the COVID‐19 crisis is prioritising human solutions. According to the World Economic Forum, redefining the role of the educator is the way COVID-19 could change how to educate future generations. Empowering teachers through enhancing their capacity and capabilities for teaching and learning is listed as one of the World Bank's key principles for EdTech in tertiary education. Teachers should start to innovate and experiment with online tools, which may end up continuing online pedagogies in the future.

Special thanks I would like to express to InfoCommAsia Pte Ltd for inviting me to share my thoughts entitled Educator's Roles in Responding to COVID-19: The WeCWI's Perspective in InfoComm SEA GoVIRTUAL Technology Spotlight Series: Technology Advancement in Education. If you are interested to join, kindly RSVP to this webinar HERE. A video of my slides is available as shown below. The key takeaways in my 20-minute sharing session are as follows:

15:00 – 16:00hrs (Bangkok / Jakarta Time)

16:00 – 17:00hrs (Singapore Time)

13:30 – 14:30hrs (India Time)

16:00 – 16:30hrs (Bangkok / Jakarta Time)

17:00 – 17:30hrs (Singapore Time)

14:30 – 15:00hrs (India Time)

As the founder of Web-based Cognitive Writing Instruction or WeCWI, I divide its contributions into two domains to design a web-based instruction (WBI): instructional design and language development. WeCWI is developed to enhance the learners’ writing and critical thinking performance, which involves applying theoretical and pedagogical principles of language acquisition, composition studies, cognitive theories, and e-learning, together with the different user interface designs to suit the learning preferences. These four main theoretical rationales are seamlessly integrated as the core of WeCWI, which can be summarised into an equation as (Language Acquisition + Composition Studies + Cognitive Theories) E-learning = Language & Cognitive Developments. The three tasks emphasised by the four theoretical rationales—reading, writing, and discussion—are essential to produce enhanced writing performance and critical thinking. To visualise it, kindly click the image.

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