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Dealing with COVID-19 is especially difficult for colleges and universities since they perform such a wide range of roles. They are, first and foremost, educational institutions where undergraduate and postgraduate students study and where research is taught and carried out by faculty. They also act as small towns or structures, like health and safety, police forces, power plants, recreational facilities, and other public institutions. They are also large local employers linked to local populations and critical drivers of local and regional economies (Illanes et al., 2020).
Overall, the epidemic is coercing academicians, supporting staff, parents, and students to think critically to solve problems and be creative, communicative, collaborative, and agile. Overall, core functions of UTHM such as teaching and learning, research activities, students’ activities, admissions, and faculty recruitment are seen unsettled and cannot be continued as UTHM is now suspending lessons, activities and gatherings.
From the last count in 2019, UTHM has 10,342 undergraduate students, 967 master’s students and 1,093 PhD students, with a total number of 12,403. To these students, their teaching and learning activities would be the most affected function during COVID-19 and research activities. Plainly, the COVID-19 has made a big shift towards e-learning as Malaysian universities compulsorily move classes online and start using electronic (E) ways of doing things in order to ensure that the HEI business processes can be continued as usual.
An unexpected change to temporary or long-term online learning establishes a challenge for brick-and-mortar universities to scale up their online learning strategies rapidly. However, Asian universities were initially slow to embrace online education due to COVID-19. Now many universities require their academician and other instructors to think about curriculums and courses in a new way, learn and teach others to use new tools, and try new techniques efficiently. Across the globe, there is a quick global move to deliver more mainstream university teaching online. The same goes for UTHM since the MCO has taken place; considering the hardware/software/systems are all there, UTHM has started transitioning to online education, where it replaced classes, meetings, discussions, presentations, and assessments with digital alternatives.
Meanwhile, among the crucial impediments, many research projects are in limbo for research activities. It seems it is quite hard for the project leaders and researchers to review and restructure project milestones and convince the funding agencies for the extension, modifying methodology and methods due to MCO and travel restriction for lab activities and data collection purposes. As the MCO period continues, most UTHM students are in their hometowns, and some were placed under isolation and quarantine in UTHM campuses.
As UTHM campuses are now closed, the majority of UTHM students are staying in their hometowns. Teaching and research still running but unfamiliar in many ways. Independently, the students must take possession of their education and research activities, understand the ways to learn and do research effectively, and what support they need even though they are away from the UTHM. They must carefully personalise their learning and research schedule, being very discipline even if the systems around them will not 100 percent ready and perfect. Admittedly, now it is time to create a new norm of core business delivery for UTHM teaching and research ecosystems.
This paper will be looking into two Disaster Management Systemic Perspectives (DMSP) during the COVID-19 outbreak, known as (1) External Resilience System (ERS) & (2) Internal Resilience System (IRS) of UTHM students. ERS will be designed for students who are located outside of UTHM campuses. Meanwhile, IRS will be designed for students who are staying in UTHM campuses. Both ERS & IRS will specifically be developed to capture geospatial metadata by integrating (1) UTHM COVID-19 Tracker with (2) MOBILISE System, a Digital Disaster Reduction System known as “A Collaborative Multi-Agency Platform for Building Resilient Communities (MOBILISE)” and its Digital Platform. The integrated system will be named MOBILISE-UTHM Resilient Tracker (RITTER).
The integration of the two systems will then be named as MOBILISE-UTHM Resilient Tracker (RITTER). The main capabilities of RITTER are able: