Looking in the Post-Covid Crystal Ball: Utopian and dystopian possibilities for Dubai private schools offering synchronous blended learning

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented change and rapid adaptation within the education sector. Like many other countries, schools in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have had to respond with very little time or preparation.

Many private schools in Dubai opted to offer a ‘blended learning’ approach for their students which would give them the choice of attending their lessons physically in class or online. The majority of schools are offering these lessons synchronously with teachers delivering the same content to both in-class and online learners at the same time.

Blended learning is a contested term in education that can refer to multiple different variations of face-to-face and online learning. Depending on the type and frequency of these, blended learning has fallen under many other terms.

At this moment, schools are at a pivotal point where the decisions they make in how they create their ‘new normal’ of blended learning will have massive impacts on their financial stability, teacher retention and well-being as well as performance in the competitive annual school inspections. In this paper, we present two contrasting progressions, both utopian and dystopian futures for Dubai private schools.