L’université à l’ère du « tout distanciel » suite à la pandémie de la Covid19

Abstract

Due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Algerian universities—like their counterparts worldwide—experienced a sudden shift toward fully remote learning. At the École Normale Supérieure of Kouba (Algiers), instructors were required to deliver all their lectures and even "practical" sessions through videoconferencing to students confined to their homes, isolated from both peers and educators. How did we experience this unprecedented situation? Were we passive participants or did we demonstrate creativity? Did this event impact our professional identity, compelling us to reassess it in order to preserve our ability to teach and train as effectively as in face-to-face settings? After five years of the occurrence of this event, remote teaching become a key component of instructional practice in this increasingly volatile and uncertain world. Technological tools and platforms are becoming more sophisticated, warranting their use in education; this global event merely accelerated the ongoing process of distancing and partial or full dematerialization of teaching activities. To draw meaningful insights from this experience, we recount our personal journey, supported by qualitative assessments and quantitative data regarding student performance and attitudes, as well as testimonials from our fellow instructors. We enumerate the challenges we encountered, particularly those related to the stance taken by both instructors and students in response to this new paradigm. These challenges prompt us to reflect on the importance of finding a pedagogical middle ground between instructors who fully embrace technology—mobilizing the entire range of digital tools—and those more skeptical, who practiced a form of "virtualized in-person" teaching. To prevent the emergence of a two-tier education system, it is essential that strategies designed for in-person teaching be reimagined for the online environment. It becomes critical to account for the diverse and often contradictory needs of students—some of whom learn best through social interaction and are thus disadvantaged by the lack of physical proximity, and others who adapt well to digital interfaces, even in the absence of direct human contact.