Education and the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Lessons from COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted educators to rethink educational practices, especially with regard to technology. The COVID-19 pandemic is a huge challenge to education systems around the world. This Viewpoint offers guidance to teachers, institutional heads, and officials on addressing the crisis. This study investigated technology use in teaching during the COVID-19 lockdown in Malaysia, focusing on technology-based teaching methods, modifications necessitated by this new teaching style, and challenges teachers faced when using technology. Using purposive sampling, a qualitative study was undertaken with a sample of 10 English language teachers from Arabic schools in Malaysia. The results indicated that a digital leap occurred in education during the COVID-19 lockdown because teachers had to quickly adapt to a more technology-based teaching style. The challenges teachers faced included managing virtual classes, ensuring reliable Internet connections, overcoming a lack of preparedness and low digital competence, and dealing with students’ mental health. Such changes in teaching methods have created new roles for teachers while also increasing their acceptance of e-learning and remote learning. The contribution of this research is to provide a holistic picture of remote education activities during the pandemic period to establish a linkage between the online teaching-learning process during the COVID-19 outbreak as to ensure the resumption of teaching-learning education as a normal course of procedure in the education system. Despite the human suffering brought by the pandemic, the new norms of education during COVID-19 generally have some pockets of excellence to drive the education into the Fourth Industrial Revolution.