Online Teaching Shift: A New AI Panacea Pedagogical Paradigm. ESP Course for EFL Learners at King Khalid University. A Case Study.

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how educational institutions are prompted, with no options, due to natural disasters, or contaminated diseases such as COVID 19, to re-establish new online pedagogical paradigms to supplant the teacher's physical presence. This scenario urged educational institutions around the globe to seek restrained options to deal with this challenging and unexpected reality, then urgently maintain an online quality teaching alternative. As stakeholders, they are expected to look for a remote pedagogy that aptly works as a shift from face-to-face lectures with the teacher's physical presence to online virtual classes avouching the possible output for successful learning. Thereby, educational institutions run to rethink, and set digital literacy skills for both educators and learners. For ESP course at King Khalid University for instance, teachers should transfer to focus on an online teaching paradigm that bridges the gap between conducting classroom pedagogy and a need to master the learners' needs analysis for their professional careers, reflecting the fact that tutors try first to identify, and then meet the diverse and often the conflicting needs of learners in order to embrace the content of ESP online pedagogy. This research investigation utilizes a qualitative method to adequately understand  the repercussions of such digital shift in higher education. Therefore, this paper concludes that adjusting a diligent online pedagogy which meets the learners' needs and a panacea educational technology becomes a sine qua non fact in such force majeure circumstances.