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The coronavirus disease in the 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has generated an unexpected educational condition; more than one billion students have been affected (UNESCO, 2020), creating a pressing need to activate alternative action plans that could assist in the sustainability of the educational operation and to realize the passive effects of the non-attendance of activities. In this situation, virtual learning platforms have emerged as contingency support on the vanguard, and as a result, technical solutions and distance learning programs have renewed significance. Accordingly, they have been adopted on a global scale as an emergency plan under the name emergency remote teaching (ERT; e.g., Hodges et al., 2020; Osman, 2020). For higher education, undergraduate and graduate programs have not been excluded as face-to-face teaching has been suspended, and many universities in different countries substituted their delivery modes with this emergency plan of learning to support them in controlling the crisis (Marinoni et al., 2020; Toquero, 2020).
After the quick shift to remote education, the educational domain has been through a disquieting variation in the quality of the conducted attempts. There has been variance between virtual educational activities that have exploited their potential to some extent (Ferdig et al., 2020), and others have shown serious educational setbacks that may leave educational gaps extending to later periods (Dorn et al., 2020). Furthermore, contingency condition studies expect a lower quality of emergency teaching activities compared with those of regular e-learning courses, in addition to a decrease in the level of technical support that provides critical services for the success of technical integration experiments (Heitz et al., 2020; Kirschner, 2015).
Despite the issues that have been identified, studies have proposed some different indicators that may display a different reality for the phases of higher education arising from the distinct characteristics of these phases. This educational style has a positive effect on undergraduate students’ learning strategies by reinforcing a more continuous habit and improving their academic progress (Gonzalez et al., 2020). A better ability to proceed to the distance teaching style has been reported by many academics and managerial staff (N = 897) in higher education institutions in the United States; meanwhile, many of them stated that new teaching methods were employed for that purpose (Johnson et al., 2020). In addition, the International Association of Universities conducted a study including 424 participants in 109 countries that provided indicators for efficient growth in new actions, offering opportunities for renovation in teaching methodologies, a shift toward digital platforms and systems, capacity building of faculty members to develop, design and use and review strategies, and ways to promote business operations in educational infrastructure to enforce sustainability (Marinoni et al., 2020). Despite being a worldwide crisis, it is arguable that the COVID-19 pandemic has had positive effects on research and academic progression and has become a significant source of graduate research (Beech 2020). The available data shows the similarity of technological innovation opportunities provided by COVID-19 to those that arose because of World War II, which heralded missile technology and digital technology.