Asian Journal of Distance Education Volume 15, Issue 1, 2020 i Published by EdTechReview (ETR), New Delhi, India ISSN 1347-9008 http://www.asianjde.org This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA license Emergency remote teaching in a time of global crisis due to CoronaVirus pandemic Aras Bozkurt 1 , Ramesh C. Sharma 2 Editorial Introduction: Education crisis on global scale due to COVID19 pandemic “Sometimes it takes a natural disaster to reveal a social disaster” Jim Wallis At the end of the day, the lesson learnt was so simple... With online and offline connections, the world is a global village (McLuhan, 1962) and a butterfly flapping its wings in Asia can cause a hurricane all around the world (Lorenz, 1972). Currently, it seems that the global education system is in the middle of this hurricane. These times, where we are all witnessing developments warily, are certainly interesting and strange, but the hope is that lessons will have been learned once things hopefully return to normal. Though there were early warnings to be prepared (White, Ramirez, Smith, & Plonowski, 2010) and already ongoing interruptions to education (Briggs, 2018; GCPEA, 2018), this is the first crisis to occur on the global scale in the digital knowledge age, and there will be socio-cultural, economic, and political consequences in the wake of this crisis. In other words, the educational landscape will feel the rush of air from the butterfly’s flapping wings to the full extent. In a nutshell, following the CoronaVirus (COVID19) outbreak in December 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified COVID19 as a global pandemic in March 2020 (WHO, 2020). To slow down and prevent its spread, many countries followed strict protocols, such as complete lockdowns or regulations to facilitate social distancing, while a few countries preferred herd immunity. Efforts to stop the viral outbreak included working from homes, providing flexible working hours, or closing many institutions where people could infect one another with COVID19. Protocols to shut down buildings involved schools, universities and many other educational institutions. This situation forced all levels of educational institutions to operate remotely and to put emergency remote teaching into practice. It is reported that more than 1.5 billion learners of all ages from around the globe are affected due to school and university closures owing to the COVID-19 (UNESCO, 2020a; UNICEF, 2020). The affected number of students equals around 90% of the world’s enrolled students (UNESCO, 2020a; 2020b), and the shutting down of schools have widened learning inequalities and have hurt vulnerable children and youth disproportionately (UNESCO, 2020a). Considering that education is a fundamental human right (UN, 1984), in adopting the motto #LearningNeverStops, different measures were taken and solutions produced immediately to sustain the education system (UNESCO, 2020a; 2020c; 2020d; 2020e); however, fueled by the digital divide (UNESCO, 2020f), this doesn’t change the fact that there are already known and there will be unpredicted consequences beyond the interruption of education (UNESCO, 2020g). 1 Aras Bozkurt: arasbozkurt@gmail.com; Anadolu University, Eskişehir, Turkey; ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4520-642X 2 Ramesh C. Sharma: rc_sharma@yahoo.com; Ambedkar University Delhi, Delhi, India; ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1371-1157