COVID-19 has affected our educational sector adversely, which resulted in the closure of all academic institutions. This global health crisis demands social distancing as the way to keep the virus away and forced the academic institutions to adapt to this physical distancing from the students as well as colleagues. The faculty needs to be motivated in order to be innovative, interactive, and accessible. The pandemic has not only led to the disappearance of old teaching methods but also the adoption of the modular concept of e-learning. Through a review-based study, the authors discuss the diverse response by the academic institutions and assesses their resilience towards education and transition to online learning during challenging times. Through this study, the authors opined that significant opportunities are there which will help in learning from pedagogical developments of other academic institutions. This will help in strengthening the collective response to COVID 19.
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Pandemics have influenced and may continue to influence, the potential of the educational institutions to enhance the learning of the students. Sloan Consortium (2008) has analysed that the capacity of the colleges & universities to continue with enhancing the learning of the students despite any catastrophe is called as academic continuity. The catastrophe situation could be caused by natural disaster, human induced disaster or any unexpected factor like pandemic. Many educational institutions are affected by these disasters and hereby affecting the academic performance of the students also. Recent occurrences of H1N1 and H5N1 influenza (Monto, 2009) and the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) (Goh et al., 2006) led to the need by educational institutions to embrace measure like closure of the institutions and quarantine in order to control the spread of infection. Sifferlin (2014) mentioned that during the outbreak of Ebola, nearly 5 million children faced the closure of schools in Africa. Paye-Layleh (2015) highlighted that the schools were shut down for 9 months in Sierra Leone while the schools were closed in Guinea and Liberia for 6 months. The schools remained suspended until October whereas they were supposed to open in August (BBC News, 2014).
COVID 19 emerged in Wuhan city of China during Dec, 2019, was declared as epidemic globally with major concern for health of the public (Lai, Shih, Ko, Tang & Hsueh, 2020). Later on Jan 30, 2020 WHO (World Health Organisation) declared it as Global Public Health Emergency which can pose threat to countries across world (Lupia et al.,2020; Sohrabi et al., 2020).This pandemic had substantial impact on the education sector globally. An emergency policy initiative was started by the Chinese government called “Suspending Classes without Stopping Learning” (Zhang, Wang, Yang, & Wang, 2020). As such no decision was taken nationwide for the shutting down of the educational institutions (Mansoor, 2020), most of the governments in their regions have decided to shut down educational institutions (The Economist, 2020). Delhi schools also got closed from 13th March (Press Trust of India, 2020). The University Grants Commission advised the universities on 19th March, 2020 to defer the assessments till March end (The Economic Times, 2020).
By April 06, 2020, almost in 170 countries academic institutions were closed and more than 13% of the students globally had to either face disruptions or they had to end up with their studies during this COVID 19. There is a global impact in almost every region What we are seeing globally is impact on every region and noticeable impact was seen on upper and lower middle income countries (Bassett, 2020). It has been proclaimed that more than 1.5 billion learners from all age groups around the universe are afflicted by educational institutions closure amid COVID 19(UNESCO, 2020a; UNICEF, 2020). But keeping in mind the maxim that “Learning never stops”, steps were taken instantly to continue system of education (UNESCO, 2020a; 2020c; 2020d; 2020e).