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Emergency situations that cause damage to educational buildings or require the closure of schools due to unsafe health, environmental, or political conditions can be an unwelcomed interruption to education. Indeed, the recent COVID‐19 pandemic created the largest disruption of education in history, affecting 94% of the world's student population. In emergencies, technology is often utilised as part of a crisis response protocol by continuing education using emergency remote education (ERE). The purpose of this study is to determine how technology has been used to continue K‐12 learning remotely during an emergency. This systematic review included an aggregated and configurative synthesis to examine extant empirical work over eleven years, from January 2010 to December 2020. Following a rigorous, PRISMA selection process, 60 articles were included in the final analysis from 48 countries. Grounded coding of the strategies used for learning revealed the following categories: communication, delivery systems, student ERE readiness, partnerships, promoting student learning and engagement, and resources. Grounded coding of the technologies revealed that types of technologies used were divided into two major categories: Internet‐based and non‐Internet based, with the majority using Internet‐based technologies. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic The COVID‐19 pandemic has caused school closures across the globe and prevented in‐person school teaching.The rapid shift to distance education in schools can be conceptualised as 'emergency remote education' (ERE).Prior ERE research focused on bounded geographic locations where localised emergencies occurred.What this paper adds This provides the scholarly community with a unique systematic review of existing academic research on K‐12 ERE implementation in emergencies.This provides aggregated data and analysis on the past 11 years of the types of emergencies, participants, subject domain, technologies used, and location information.This provides findings of the types of remote teaching strategies involving technology used to continue K‐12 learning in emergency situations.This provides a set of recommendations on ERE for teachers, school leaders, policy makers, and funders.This provides researchers with a review of the field with identification of gaps and future research opportunities.Implications for practice and/or policy Recommendations regarding ERE are provided in this paper that will be of benefit to K‐12 teachers, school leaders policymakers, and funders in the continuing COVID‐19 pandemic and future emergencies.The research gaps highlighted in this paper, such as the lack of studies conducted in low and low middle‐income countries, are presented with suggestions for much needed future research. This can lead to changes in practice and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online learning is currently adopted by educational institutions worldwide to provide students with ongoing education during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Even though online learning research has been advancing in uncovering student experiences in various settings (i.e., tertiary, adult, and professional education), very little progress has been achieved in understanding the experience of the K‐12 student population, especially when narrowed down to different school‐year segments (i.e., primary and secondary school students). This study explores how students at different stages of their K‐12 education reacted to the mandatory full‐time online learning during the COVID‐19 pandemic. For this purpose, we conducted a province‐wide survey study in which the online learning experience of 1,170,769 Chinese students was collected from the Guangdong Province of China. We performed cross‐tabulation and Chi‐square analysis to compare students' online learning conditions, experiences, and expectations. Results from this survey study provide evidence that students' online learning experiences are significantly different across school years. Foremost, policy implications were made to advise government authorises and schools on improving the delivery of online learning, and potential directions were identified for future research into K‐12 online learning. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic Online learning has been widely adopted during the COVID‐19 pandemic to ensure the continuation of K‐12 education.Student success in K‐12 online education is substantially lower than in conventional schools.Students experienced various difficulties related to the delivery of online learning.What this paper adds Provide empirical evidence for the online learning experience of students in different school years.Identify the different needs of students in primary, middle, and high school.Identify the challenges of delivering online learning to students of different age.Implications for practice and/or policy Authority and schools need to provide sufficient technical support to students in online learning.The delivery of online learning needs to be customised for students in different school years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As other papers have made clear, government interest in Distance Education is high and rising. There is therefore an inevitability that it will play a much larger part in future decision-making. In writing about this subject, Séamus Ó Buachalla has the advantage of much experience and greater insight. He has been a teacher, an inspector in the Irish Government Education Service, and is now a Professor in the Department of Teacher Education of Trinity College, Dublin. In addition he has worked for the Ministry as a planner and, outside Ireland, has done consultancy work for Unesco, the Council of Europe and the European Cultural Foundation. With that sort of varied experience, who better to write an informed and well-researched .paper on this important topic. As other papers have made clear, government interest in Distance Education is high and rising. There is therefore an inevitability that it will play a much larger part in future decision-making. In writing about this subject, Séamus Ó Buachalla has the advantage of much experience and greater insight. He has been a teacher, an inspector in the Irish Government Education Service, and is now a Professor in the Department of Teacher Education of Trinity College, Dublin. In addition he has worked for the Ministry as a planner and, outside Ireland, has done consultancy work for Unesco, the Council of Europe and the European Cultural Foundation. With that sort of varied experience, who better to write an informed and well-researched .paper on this important topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments tend to have strong opinions about education, largely because education eats up a large proportion of their budget. They do not always, however, have the opportunity to express those opinions in reasoned terms in learned journals. Here is the exception. Nicholas Fox has been seconded from the UK Training Agency to the COMETT Technical Unit. He thus has experience both of national and international governmental operations and an almost unique insight into the ways in which government decisionmaking takes place and the reasons why certain programmes are accepted while others fail. In this paper he gives an overview of European Distance Education programmes, and uses examples in the UK and France to illustrate national strategies in that field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]