A Pilot Study on Online-Education Supportive Tools in COVID-19 Context

Excessive proliferation of COVID-19 -posed negative impacts on many sectors, especially the education sector. As a result, educational institutions around the world are closed; thus, online learning seems to be an optimal way to bridge the communication gap between students and teachers. Online-learning tools provide an effective way to continue the learning process in a COVID-19 context. However, finding the best tool that meets most of the online-learning requirements remains a challenging task. Additionally, it is essential to identify and respond to the underlying concerns of students and teachers in an online-learning environment. Motivated by this, current work provides a comparative analysis of existing learning tools grounded on the set of features mentioned in the literature. Moreover, we conduct a pilot study on students and teachers of various universities (taking online classes) of south-east Asia region. The conducted study reveals that some new features need to be accommodated to improve online teaching. Finally, we propose a set of recommendations to further enhance the online-learning environment.