Abstract
Both ICT and internet have become a vital part of citizens’ daily lives. In fact, many aspects of cities, including culture, economy, education have become closely linked to ICT. Accordingly, the concept of the smart city has emerged to attract the interest of governments, companies, educational institutions and Universities [1]. In Morocco, most universities or higher education institutions have always been interested in keeping up with the fast-paced world of technology and integrate ICT in mainstream education. However, most attempts to initiate smart universities is always faced with a series of challenges and constraints. Most of which are related to lack of infrastructure, students’ and professors’ lack of technological readiness, and socio-economic inequality among students. Most recently, due to COVID-19, universities are forced to resort to emergency remote learning and scramble different options of e-learning as a dire need to tackle the current educational crisis which creates a certain chaos due to lack of readiness to an advanced technological application. This paper is an attempt to discuss the challenges posed and opportunities offered using e-learning to deal with the new normal (Covid-19) in different educational levels in general and higher education in particular. Significantly, this paper reviews most of that has been said about online learning, describes some of the conducted empirical studies, and calls for implementing e-learning as an innovative teaching strategy for smart universities.
Highlights
In the aftermath of most calamities, be they natural or human, knowledge delivery becomes a challenging task
The traditional mode is seriously pummelled as online learning has become a necessity in higher education [5]
This paper aims to propagate, among stakeholders, that e-learning has to be adopted as a teaching strategy for future Moroccan smart universities
Summary
In the aftermath of most calamities, be they natural or human, knowledge delivery becomes a challenging task. In March 2020, the general director of WHO declared Covid-19 as a pandemic after assessing its spread and severity across the globe Following this declaration comes the precautionary measures to deal with the new situation. Covid 19 pandemic has an unprecedented impact in that it hampers the provision of face-to-face courses on a global scale. This pandemic has disrupted educational systems worldwide and the belief in face-to-face learning mode starts losing its relevance [3]. Even before pandemic there was already a widespread acknowledgement that e-learning has challenged the traditional face-to-face higher educational model [5]. Online learning in high income countries covers about 8085 per cent, while this drops to 50 per cent in low income countries [8]
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