COVID-19 and Online Learning Tools

Global tracking of COVID-19 caused school closures and re-openings

Abstract

Distance education has a long history. However, COVID-19 has created a new era of distance education. Due to the increasing demand, various distance learning solutions have been introduced for different distance education purposes. In this study, we investigated the impact of COVID-19 on global attention towards different distance learning-teaching tools. We used Google Trend search queries as a proxy to quantify the popularity and public interest towards different distance education solutions. Both visual and analytical approaches were used to analyse global level web search queries during the COVID-19 pandemic. This can provide a fast first step guide to identifying the most popular online learning tools available for different educational purposes. The results allow the teachers to narrow down the search space and deepen their exploration of prominent distance education solutions to support their online teaching. The R code and data to reproduce the results of this work are available in the online supplementary materials.

Publication
arXiv 2201.06927
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Priyanga Dilini Talagala
PhD in Statistics

My research interests include Computational Statistics, Anomaly Detection, Time Series Analysis and Machine Learning.