The higher education institutes (HEIs) are playing a key role in imparting entrepreneurship education. Entrepreneurship education is mainly based on experiential education and received a setback due to COVID-19 as all the HEIs in the region were forced to shift to unplanned online teaching. This chapter analyses the situation of COVID-19 from the perspective of economy, entrepreneurship, and HEI roles during the pandemic and post-pandemic scenarios. This chapter proposed an environment model suggesting the need for state intervention in the entrepreneurship education that subsequently influences social entrepreneurship.
TopBackground Of The Study
The Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) in the GCC countries are also promoting entrepreneurship education by running specialized courses on entrepreneurship (Gangi,2017; Faisal et.al., 2017). These courses touch the element of social entrepreneurship as well. The delivery method of the classes was mainly face to face till the time the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic happened. This pandemic was a surprise for the world as it quickly spread over the other parts of the world (Ratten,2020; Cortez and Johnston, 2020). This pandemic lead to disruption to global interactions as the countries were forced to close their border, and impose lockdowns/shutdowns (Alon et al., 2020). The Universities too had to close their routine activities and had to conduct their teaching and learning process, through online platform (Ratten,2020; Liguori and Winkler, 2020).
The higher education institutes are equipped to handle the natural disasters like earth quake, tornados etc but are not ready do deal with the health crisis like covid 19 (Ratten,2020). Thus, the universities were not prepared to handle such crisis. Another, aspect to consider was the uncertainty of the duration of this crisis, that again led to miscalculations in terms of strategic formulations on many levels. The Higher Education Institutes were majorly found dependent on the government directives and many universities found limited scope in terms of innovation and out of the box thinking. In other words, education innovation received negligible attention during the current pandemic (Ferreira et al., 2018).
The current Covid-19 crisis has had significant health and workplace implications particularly for educators (Bacq et al., 2020; Bocar et al., 2022). Working and learning from home that used to be considered as a luxury and was optional before the crisis, became a necessity (Ratten,2020). The students were asked to attend the classes online on the other hand the teachers involved in online teaching didn’t have the experience of using the digital platform. The availability of the appropriate devices is another issue that needs to be taken care of while implementing the work from home/ learn from home (Scott, 2020; Bocar et al., 2022). All together the current Covid-19 crisis is complex as it changed the way individuals conduct their daily life and for the universities and HEIs it changed the way their services are offered. Ratten, (2020, p 754) states, “The impact of Covid-19 on the global education system has been profound and impacted all areas of teaching, research and service.”