As soon as COVID-19 was confirmed a pandemic, schools and universities around the world were forced to shift to distance learning to maintain social distancing. Likewise, the Libyan Ministry of Education aimed at mitigating the impact of COVID-19 on learners’ educational progress and found alternatives to in-person lessons through recording and broadcasting lessons on television on Libyan TV channels. Current literature review indicates the scarcity of literature on television-based distance education during a pandemic in the Libyan context. Thus, the present study addressed this shortcoming by investigating the opinions of the Libyan educational television team’s perspectives. The design of the study was exploratory mixed methods as we gathered both qualitative and quantitative data to get accurate and detailed picture of the managers’ and teachers’ views. The context of the study is the Libyan General Center for Training and Education Development. The participants were 6 managers and 27 teachers. Data were collected through observations, focus group discussion, and questionnaires. The results showed that the participants encountered administrative, personal, educational, and technical and logistical challenges. The participants suggestions as ways of conquering those challenges included providing the technical support and the required equipments, organizing the schedule of live broadcasts in terms of lesson content, time, and grade level, providing training courses for teachers on all the programs that are used in distance education, along with other suggestions. We expect that our findings would provide the educational TV managers and teachers with ideas for improvement and encourage researchers to conduct further and more rigorous testing on educational TV.
Entisar ALi Hadi Elsherif, Hana Abdulsalam Ahmed Meiteeq, (8-2021)