In this chapter an endeavour has been established to capture the pre-COVID-19 and COVID-19-related educational transformation and adaptability of the teaching-learning community to embrace the exigency-based changes along with the exploration of the community of inquiry model (CoI) with its three basic elements: social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence. The chapter also delves into the learners' and teachers' reactions and adaptability towards the change to acquire it as a permanent solution to the traditional teaching procedure. There would be a discourse on the use of ICT (information and communications technology) to address the issues of coping mechanism with the virtual platform, making it a seamless process. In this chapter, the target audience gets a fair cognitive familiarity with the present state and future prediction of the COVID-19-driven pandemic and ramification of it in the future for academic discourse and referencing.
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The Covid 19 introduced a havoc transformation in the global educational scenario by creating huge disturbances, alienation and almost collapse of the existing teaching-learning process. The precautionary measures incorporated several social distancing, shielding and cleaning norms, culminating in Government declaration for closing of Schools, Colleges and other educational Institutions. (Pokhrel and Chhetri,2021) as the instantaneous impact of tremendously contagious Novel Corona virus (Dhawan, 2020) divulging the world to a never before dilemma. The Government of most of the countries led to a strategic paradigm shift overnight to deal with the concurrence and potential danger (Chaturvedi et al., 2020). Following the protocol of several first world countries, Bhutan was the first to shut down the educational Institutes among SAARC countries, which later intensified as national lock down policy (Kuensel, 2020, (Palden, 2020). Under such pressure of home bound situation, teaching-learning process stranded a need for blended learning with both Flex and Enriched Virtual Model through ‘online pivot’ (George, 2020). An instant shift of education from ‘Brick and Mortar’ to ‘Phygital’ Mode compelled both the teachers’ and Learners’ community to adapt to the newness and speed of change (Zimmerman, 2020; Huarcaya-Victoria, 2020). This brought a psychological collision to the already lifestyle compromised teaching-learning community, compressing the entire educational system to digital interface of e-learning (Chaturvedi et al, 2019; Govindarajan et al, 2020). The teaching Community initiated adapting to infrastructural development to equip themselves (Bao, 2020) to deliver the lectures in streaming platform or in recorded version of it to acclimatize ameliorating the procedure (Acharya, 2017), (Ajzen, I. 1991). The academic seniors experimented with virtual classrooms like ‘Virtual Interactive Case-Based Education’ They deliberately chose platforms like Zoom, MS-Teams, Google Meet, Google Classroom, Google with screen sharing and virtual breakout group capability (eg, Zoom) and included text-based audience response to capitalize on learner engagement and encourage camaraderie (Redinger et al, 2020). A virtual learning Environment (VLE) is created to enable a perfect teaching-learning experience with an integration and amalgamation of e-learning method (Al-Fraihat, 2020). Studies revealed that teachers can foster perceived control over the scholars and offer direction on most excellent avenues for teaching-learning amid pandemic.