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The world today is facing an increasing number of “wicked and unforeseen” problems – climate changes, food security, water scarcity, gender inequality, unsustainable economic development, global pandemic, and others, to name a few. The COVID-19 global pandemic health crisis has had and will have a long-term bearing on societies, schools, and higher education systems. The COVID-19 pandemic and its related consequences directly affected about 1.6 billion learners globally, from primary to tertiary education (UNESCO, 2020). This pandemic has created a point of no return to the conventional higher education system. The lockdown experienced across countries and regions have already led to a sudden and rapid shift to online modes of teaching and learning. However, most of the educational systems worldwide has adopted the shift from traditional face-to-face to a blended learning paradigm; the challenge we have is that trying to solve or overcome our problems with the same mindset that created the problems will just not work.
Due to COVID-19 pandemic, many countries across the world have implemented school closures affecting over 1.6 billion learners who were not allowed to attend regular schools with the purpose to prevent the spread of the epidemic (Li & Lalani, 2020). The decision was sudden and educational institutions had no alternative but to introduce online distance learning to maintain and transmit its services to all educational stakeholders (ÖZER, 2020; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO], 2020). The rapid response includes different forms of learning such as distance learning solutions and home-based distance learning during the pandemic, and tech-enhanced school systems after the pandemic (Miao, 2020).
According to UNESCO statistics (2020), the closures of schools all over the world in order to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 has affected 91% of the student population. National exams have been canceled, schools and universities are locked down, and learning has moved from classroom settings to homes. Teachers, school principals, and parents are now tasked with home schooling, aided by online learning technologies to provide education.
In the United Arab Emirates, as in countries worldwide, there has been a widespread shutdown of non-essential businesses, schools and universities to encourage social distancing and ensure a high safety rate. Therefore, like 1.6 billion learners across 165 countries, learners in the UAE have been either asked or required to stay home from school (UNESCO, 2020). The UAE’s government mandated the closure of all schools and universities on March 8, bringing the school and universities holidays forward and requiring approximately 1150,000 learners to transition to distance learning. Distance learning was further extended till June 2020, the end of the academic year. Meanwhile, the government began to work closely with school principals and teachers to immediately start pursuing online and distance education (Houalla, 2020).
As hundreds of thousands of teachers, faculty and learners around the world, log into teaching and learning cyberspaces, we explore how this transition could change the educational landscape for decades to come. As universities deliver education through online mode, learners are at the receiving end of online education and so the resistance towards online education may be considerably reduced. There has been a paradigm shift in the concept of schools and schooling, which need modern methods of management and leadership. Thus, the higher education institutions, public and private sectors, and organizations are asked to generate innovative and disruptive learning solutions and policies to respond to and lead the digital transformation shift while keeping customer’s needs and satisfaction as a strategic priority.