COVID-19 Outbreak Response Plan: Implementing Distance Education in

Moroccan Universities

Zineb Draissi1, Qi ZhanYong1

¹School of Education, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an 710062, China.
zineb.draissi.faculte@gmail.com qizhanyong@snnu.edu.cn

Abstract
The rapid spread of new COVID-19 outbreak is presenting major challenges to societies
across the world, with direct and complex impacts on higher education institutions and
systems. We believe there are significant opportunities to learn from the quickly
pedagogical plan implemented by Moroccan Ministry of Education, in order to
strengthen the country response to COVID-19 now and into the future, and shedding
the light on institutionalizing learning in the areas of crisis/risk management, training,
and decision-making in the lenses of the sustainable development education as well as
highly embedding the technology into curricula, and investing in scientific research.
Through a content analysis of the daily newspaper Moroccan World News and official
reports of the Ministry of Education and universities website, we are dressing the
current situation and extracting the areas needing an urgent assessment during and after
the outbreak.
Key Words: Covid19, Distance Education, Sustainable Development, Risk
Management.

1. Introduction
Coronavirus disease or commonly known as COVID19 is the news of every single
second since it originated from Wuhan, specially in Hubei province (Wang et al., 2020).
Once the World Health Organization has announced that COVID-19 is characterized as
a pandemic, on March 13 the Ministry of National Education, Vocational Training,
Higher Education and Scientific Research (MNE) announces the closure of preschool
and nursery school, educational institutions, vocational training, managerial training,
universities, including language centers and schools under the responsibility of foreign
missions. At the time of writing of this paper, the COVID-19 outbreak is upending daily
life across Morocco and around the world. As of 29 April, confirmed cases across the
country totaled over 4321 infected cases, and deaths from the disease had nearly
reached 168 (Worldometer, n.d.) while the recovered cases had reached 928 (See figure
1 in the Appendix). The Ministry of Education have launched a series of distance
education initiatives, opening universities online platforms and engaging some
Television channels broadcast course for the rural areas where the network capacity is
lower. Therefore, we undertake this analysis to answer the core research question: How

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are universities responding to COVID-19? We continue to address this in our discussion
to provide some preliminary types of current and forthcoming university responses to
deal with the upcoming challenging future in the lenses of sustainable development
education as a required measure to overcome such situation.
2. Methodology
In this study, we examined different documents consisting of news articles special
Education of the daily newspaper (Moroccan World News), Ministry of Education
reports’ and notices from universities website. For this purpose, our manuscript
employed a content analysis approach, which its prominent form is media analysis
A prominent form of content analysis is media analysis because media are generally
acknowledged to play a key role in interpreting and disseminating ideas about public
policy (Bengtsson, 2016). Most content analysis is textual document analysis which
analyze any type of printed materials (e.g., newspapers, governmental publications,
etc).Thus, with careful consideration to the relevance of the information source aiming
to create a rigorous status update for Moroccan universities, it is critical to choose
reliable sources to draw a full picture of the distance education responding to the
covid19 outbreak. Using the database of MWN and the MOE website search engines,
we searched the terms ‘higher education’ and ‘covid19’ in the rubric titled Education,
using the daily newspaper’s functionality of saving results, we were able to export all
the results from the search into Excel and saving their respective pdfs for the analysis
in one folder.
Table 1. Sources used for funding

Source Type Total Publication of articles

Moroccan World News (MWN) 20
Universities Notices 13
Reports from MOE 14
The data were cleaned to remove the articles included the search terms but were not
relevant to the study, such as 100% Made-in-Morocco Ventilator and Thermometer to
Hit Market Soon. We present these results in Table 1, noting that the reports from MOE
are in French, so we have been assisted by a linguistic research for an accurate
translation, however, choosing only the Moroccan World News was the only daily
newspaper chosen since the articles are in English language, to reduce the bias of
translation form co-authors.
Two members of the research team coded the articles separately and subsequently
corrected some of the categorization based on the comparison of rating. We used the
software program NVivo to facilitate the search for patterns, we were interesting of
identifying two types of patterns the key topics and their respective arguments to

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support the pedagogical digital plan launched by the Ministry of National Education,
Vocational Training, Higher Education, and Scientific Researchers.
Perhaps, most fundamental was the difficulty of aligning data collected in short time
because of the fast-moving nature of this situation today. Indeed, decisions, initiatives
and responses have been evolving daily, if not hourly.
3. Quick Response form educational institutions
After declared a state of emergency and the one month as lockdown in the whole
country; the following up decisions launched a series of initiatives starting by offering
Moroccan students free internet access to the educational websites, which was the title
of one of retrieved articles from the daily newspaper. This initiative has relieved the
data credits in the era of COVID-19 where the student educational progress is ultimately
related to the digital content.
“…The move seeks to ensure the continuity of the pedagogic approach aiming to
provide all students with the opportunity to benefit from remote learning in the best
conditions” (Kasraoui, 2020c)
Meanwhile, universities deans’ meeting on how to examine the ways to potentially
administer distance education if the situation in the country is getting worst, Moroccan
universities under calls from the Ministry of Education of Morocco have responded
reasonably quickly by implementing online education network platforms to help
college teachers conduct online lectures through systematic training which make the
universities performing higher education functions, and playing their traditional role in
terms of giving classes, supervising students, involving in scientific research and
assigning reports and revising lessons.
At the same vein, many leading universities have shown remarkable initiative in
accepting their social responsibilities, opening teaching platforms to Moroccan students
without charge. High profile examples include the Mohammed VI Polytechnic
University Online Learning Platform and University of Hassan II for college students,
and the platform “Tilmid Tice” for primary, secondary and high school learners.
“The initiative’s organizers emailed over 9,000 students and teachers,
sharing details on how to access and use the platform, according to the
statemen […], designed for digital use in a collaborative effort by the
Mohammed VI Polytechnic University” (Guessous, 2020)
Beside the available options and techniques for distance education and being aware of
the network capacity and lacking internet access in remote and rural areas, thereby
leading to a loss in educational opportunities. Therefore, Television channels have been
also mobilized to replace the face-to-face classes, Tamazight and Al Ayoun channel
broadcasting classes were addressed for primary and secondary school students, while
The Arryadia channel educational broadcasts were purposefully for university students
starting from (Kasraoui, 2020b, 2020d)

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4. Educational partnership pre-COVID-19 outbreak
An interesting funding was that Morocco in the period of spreading the coronavirus in
the neighbor’s countries such as Italy, Spain and France, were enhancing a series of
partnership with International universities to boost the E-learning pedagogy by
launching the first Interactive Digital Center at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic
University (UM6P) in North part of the country. The center is a public-private
collaboration between the Moroccan Ministry and the US Agency for International
Development, aiming to train students in technology for success in tomorrow’s
workforce, which is the core concern for today’s responses to the COVID-19 outbreak.
Continuously, on the beginning of March, the European Union and the country
representative have discussed ways to strengthen cooperation in higher education and
scientific research, mainly by looking at student mobility, research in education, digital
technology, and artificial intelligence (Hatim, 2020; Kasraoui, 2020a, 2020e). Those
pre-outbreak cooperation have been slightly beneficial for the country to ensure the
education of students in the time of COVID-19, even though switching from traditional
learning to online learning need an accurate design focusing on online pedagogies.
In addition to, in number, the website of remoting classes has reached 600 000 users
per day on March 16, associating that to 3000 educational videos producing in this
period and teams service organizing distance learning courses through virtual classes.
Meanwhile the ministry has also launched electronic platforms that enable professors
to upload lectures for their students as well as facilitating the communication between
them. Hereby, for vocational training “distance learning” website has been launched,
which provides the possibility of creating virtual classes, and enables professors and
trainers to communicate and share lessons easier. (Elouahsoussi, 2020a, 2020b; News,
2020)
Simultaneously, the Ministry of Education has announced a program to promote
scientific research in all fields related to COVID-19 by investing $1 million, an
initiative targeting to multiple efforts to find solutions to the coronavirus crisis, and to
mitigate potential future pandemics, by giving opportunity to the country’s human
capital resources, the research staff is required to answer questions on how to analyze
the spread of COVID-19, and to come up with resolutions and recommendations for
the transition from the confinement period to life post-lockdown, as declared by the
minister:
“The research projects should be able to understand the current situation and

to analyze it at both the national and regional levels,”

Dealing with unexpected event cancelations (such as graduations), possible campus
closures or postponing mid-term examinations and assignments have revealed areas
that Ministry of Education need to arose notable interest on, likewise developing

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strength and institutionalizing learning in the areas of crisis/risk planning, training,
management and decision-making. Obviously, migrating from traditional or blended
learning to a fully virtual and online delivery strategy will not happen overnight and is
associated with many challenges we have addressed in this paper; skillsets needed to
professionally design and offer online/ virtual education.
5. Conclusion and Recommendations
What is particularly alarming is that post-COVID-19 pandemic challenge universities
to continue to overcome difficulties in the ongoing battle, from all stakeholders starting
from student to professors, investing more in scientific research and believing in its
human capital resources to redouble their sustained efforts to discover an effective
vaccine.
Moreover, because education is claimed to be most effective means that society
possesses for confronting the challenges of the future (UNESCO 2002). In fact, since
the new pedagogies have virtually all been based on increasing the level of autonomy
of the student, after this outbreak it’s necessarily for the Ministry of Education to give
a full consideration firstly to strengthening student autonomy which will help him to
master his/her own learning process in the future, secondly motivating university
lectures as well by pushing them to implement more motivating learning experiences
simultaneously with the classic lecture. Consequently, an additional duties have been
assigned for professors to keep their works momentum from home, providing the
teachers the free access to a few paid e-learning platforms or academic article databases
and tell them to utilize it from their home (Bhat et al., 2020), as well as implementing
the sustainable development of technology innovation to embedded technology into the
curricula. These measures are in the umbrella of the sustainable development education
(Caeiro et al., 2013, p. 35) aiming to help all higher education stakeholders to deal with
the challenging time that Moroccan universities might face likewise the current
pandemic the world is going through.
Overall, students in the time of COVID-19 are the key target audience and the
Academic and administrative staff are referenced as key recipients. Thus, the
sustainable development education shall shed light on these actors while universities
undergoing a rapid change period needing leading to ask a serious question about their
ability to continuously monitor the quality of the online learning design.

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Appendix
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Infected cases Recovered Deaths

Figure 1. Propagation of COVID19 in Morocco

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