COVID-19 and Online Learning Tools
This work helps teachers narrow down and explore distance education solutions for online teaching, but it is incremental as it applies an existing method to new data.
The study investigated the impact of COVID-19 on global attention to distance learning tools by analyzing Google Trend search queries to quantify popularity, providing a guide to identify the most popular online learning tools for educational purposes.
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 analyze 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.