Select Page

Exploring Modes of Remote Learning in Palestine During the Pandemic with Samaa Haniya, Hassan Abed, and Asmaa Mustafa

Education is highly valued in Palestine. According to a data report by the United Nations in 2018, nearly 95.4 percent of children attend schools. Yet, access to a high quality education is still an issue of concern for several ongoing economic, social and political aspects. The arrival of the pandemic came to add to these challenges causing an unexpected disruption to the education system. Despite this fact, people were to find alternative ways to continue learning while socially distanced. In this talk, we will discuss how schools in Palestine were able to cope with the pandemic disruption? How their remote learning model(s) look like? What are the opportunities that these models were able to offer? What are the associated challenges? What was the administration’ role to deal with the ongoing challenges, such as limited electricity, devices, and internet? And, how teachers were able to overcome these challenges? More about our guests below the video.



Episode Guests

Dr. Samaa Haniya is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education and Psychology at Pepperdine University. She has many years of experience designing, implementing, evaluating, and researching e-learning practices both in small and large-scale learning environments, such as MOOCs. Her research interests focus on humanizing education practices through digital transformation and innovative pedagogies to foster mastery learning for all learners. To achieve this goal, she examines user experience, instructional models, and learning behaviors taking place in different online courses and e-learning platforms in relation to learner differences. Her research has been published in well-known national and international journals, books, and conference proceedings, such as ACM, E-Learning and Digital Media, Routledge and IGI Global.

Mr. Hassan Abed is the English Language Supervisor in Gaza, Palestine. He has many years of experience managing, leading and developing the English language programs and teaching practices across the different schools in Gaza city in Palestine. Prior to holding this role,  he was a distinguished English language teacher at various levels. Mr. Abed is highly passionate to make learning enjoyable and reflective to learners’ needs. In doing so, he uses his positive attitude and tireless energy to encourage teachers to innovate and change.

Ms. Asmaa Mustafa is an English Language teacher in Gaza, Palestine. She has several years of experience teaching English at a high school level. Ms. Mustafa always like to innovate new ways to help learners learn differently using digital media. She also serves a coach in the school district to provide professional development for teachers. Her distinguished work received several awards nationally and globally, such as the Global Teacher Award in 2020 and the Teacher Star in Palestine in 2020.