Teaching Preservice Teachers about COVID-19 through Distance Learning

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, almost all universities in the United States switched to online learning in March 2020. We, as educators, faced the reality of switching to online teaching using Zoom. Our approach was to use COVID-19 as the course content to help motivate preservice teachers (PSTs) and alleviate some of the challenges of online teaching, an approach that was also used recently by Sadler at al. (2020) with high school teachers. The present paper describes the challenges we encountered during the six-week period of online teaching and the strategies we used to overcome these challenges. We briefly describe the course, the revisions we made to the course using the COVID-19 pandemic as content, the challenges we faced with online or virtual teaching, and the opportunities we provided the PSTs. Finally, we reflect on what we have learned from this experience.