Higher education systems do not adapt quickly to changes and lack flexibility, so individual and social demands for higher education remain with a fairly significant number of requests and individuals seek elsewhere for solutions. Universities are the key players in the future of Europe. For the successful transition to a knowledge and society-based economy, in this crucial times, a thorough restructuring and modernization is required. Over the last decade, the advancement of new technologies has allowed users to meet their own learning and communication needs both with colleagues and teachers, within their own communities or within external communities, built for educational purposes and using social media tools and services. However, online delivery of high-quality video tutorials or classes was never a must or a priority. The most preferred type of online classes before pandemics where the business specific ones or foreign language classes. Once the Coronavirus crisis stroke the entire learning environment was “forced” to migrate online, therefore online learning switched from a preferred or sometimes available option to a new normality. More than three hundred million students around the world did encounter disruptions in their education process caused by the spread of Coronavirus. Educational institutions have not confronted such severe disruption in decades, but unlike any past occurrences, now there is the ability to continue the education with the doors closed. Whereas taking into account that learning by using new information and technology sources has been around for a long period of time, it is remarkable how the impact of technology did not have a substantial influence on education until now. Digitalization in education was meant to happen gradually, but COVID-19 made it an accelerated process with large scale adoption of educational technologies and a boom of online ways of delivering courses. In this paper I perform an analysis through a prospective study on digital challenges in higher education institutions during the latest pandemics. The importance of the analysed subject is derived from the situation in which universities ended up, during these hard times. Also, the analysis of this subject reveals several factors, besides the digital infrastructure, that are very important in the online delivery of education, and namely: adapted course outline and design; tutor/trainer/professors’ skills set for delivering the course in “special” conditions; tracking the understanding; motivating the involvement and compensating for the missing human side.
Keywords:
Higher education, pandemics, online teaching and learning, digitalization.
References:
[1] Ilanes P., Law, J., Mendy, A., Sanghvi, S., Sarakatsannis, J., (March 2020). Coronavirus and the campus: How can US higher education organize to respond?, McKinsey & Company, retrieved from
https://www.mckinsey.com/.
[2] Maringe, F., (April, 2020). Lessons for university leaders from the COVID-19 crisis, retreived from:
https://www.universityworldnews.com/.
[3] Țălu, S., (2019) Implications of modern digital technologies in higher education. Advances in Economics, Business and Management Research, volume 105.[
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