Higher Education in Syria Post-war and Pandemic: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

AbstractThe ten-year-old war in Syria has had a profound impact on all national sectors, including higher education. The damages inflicted on the sector were huge and enormous, ranging from losses of higher education infrastructure to higher education expertise; drop in teaching quality and disruption of the academic year; in addition to limited higher education funding, as funds were diverted to support other urgent priorities. In early 2020, as the Syrian higher education system was slowly recovering from the war, it was confronted with another major challenge, namely the COVID-19 Pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused the largest disruption of education in history worldwide, impacting learning and teaching in institutions, ranging from primary to secondary schools, technical and vocational training institutes, and universities. In March 2020, to prevent the spread of the pandemic, the Higher Education Council (HEC) in Syria ordered a lockdown of all higher education institutions for a period that lasted more than two months. This caused a major disruption to the academic year and to the teaching and learning process across the board. HEC also encouraged higher education institutions to continue with online teaching during the lockdown to maintain students’ engagement. Many higher education institutions in Syria, especially large public universities, were unprepared to implement the HEC decree regarding online education. Many teaching staff did not have the proper training in these new methods of education delivery. Furthermore, from the students’ perspective, the absence of necessary equipment, limited internet access, and the lack of support for students to follow online programs have all proved to be a formidable and unsurmountable obstacle. This eventually led the Ministry of Higher Education, to abandon its decree and ask all higher education institutions to go back to face-to-face teaching and compensate for the lost courses once the lockdown was lifted. In this chapter, the status of the Syrian higher education system prior to the COVID-19 pandemic is highlighted, including the enormous challenges it was facing in the post-war era. The additional challenges caused by COVID-19 pandemic are also described as well as the measures taken by the Syrian Higher Education Council to mitigate and overcome these challenges. Case studies on how higher education institutions in Syria tried to cope with the pandemic are presented as well as a case study from a prominent UK university. A new vision and options on how to prepare the higher education system in Syria in the future to address such challenges is also presented and discussed.KeywordsSyriaWarCOVID-19Higher educationRecovery