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Top1. Introduction
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) lockdowns across the world have compelled economies to confront crucial challenges, inevitably disturbing the pedagogical sphere, with adverse consequences for teachers, who have had to work remotely from their workplaces (e.g., schools and universities; see Hasan & Bao, 2020). Although governments intended to slowly restart the economy after a short lockdown period, it was found that suspending physical classes at schools was a crucial measure in curbing coronavirus transmissions and stopping healthcare facilities from being overwhelmed (Ocampo & Yamagishi, 2020). Given such drastic conditions, other viable means to sustain the functioning of crucial infrastructures (e.g., education) were explored in ways unprecedented in recent history. Consequently, distance education gathered momentum as the only immediate solution for supporting suppressed activities, and communication technologies became crucial means of sustaining various community functions, including schools and all areas of work. In the education sector, these instant and undoubtedly startling transformations may have caused a range of challenges to the success of both teachers and students (Rapanta et al., 2020).
The massive shift from traditional offline teaching to online mode has brought some challenges to higher education institutions (HEIs) in delivering quality education (Sahu, 2020; Bao, 2020). Some of these challenges include student performance assessment (Al-Amin et al., 2020), hands-on experience, and other activities which can only be performed by being physically within the campus (e.g., laboratory work, visits to the library, tutoring, remedial teaching, and research and collaboration; see Mishra et al., 2020), distance, scale, and personalized teaching and learning (Dhawan, 2020), among others. In developing economies, HEIs have experienced policy paralysis in education around planning, management, and organization due to their poor technical infrastructure, academic incompetency, and lack of resources (Thomas, 2020). Moreover, technology, culture, practices, skills and competencies, individual values, and attitudes are also considered barriers to the digital transformation of HEIs (Vial, 2019). As of this writing, most HEIs, if not all, are still closed in 177 countries, a condition that has affected more than one billion students globally, or 72.4% of total enrolled learners (UNESCO, 2020). With these closures, the COVID-19 crisis has increased virtual mobility and collaborative online learning in HEIs to 60% (Mbyinoni et al., 2020). Thus, because of sudden shifts in operations, HEIs are confronted with stressful circumstances in responding to the COVID-19 crisis while pushing through the academic year (Marinoni et al., 2020). For one thing, online courses require intricate lesson plan design, teaching materials (e.g., audio-visual materials), and technical support teams (Bao, 2020), for which many HEIs, particularly those in developing countries, lack the required training and infrastructure. Those in academe have been abruptly confronted with concerns about the lack of online teaching practice and training, slow internet speed, WIFI coverage, interface design, quality content, system use, and students’ adoption of systems, and technical infrastructure in rural areas, among others (Azhari & Ming, 2015; Shahzad et al., 2020). Given these conditions, academics need to be trained in the learning management systems and/or other digital platforms provided by the HEIs through a plethora of lectures, webinars, and tutorials to effectively use these tools (Donitsa-Schmidt & Ramot, 2020).