Abstract
The outbreak of the novel coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)–CoV-2, has gained unprecedented global attention. SARS-CoV-2, which causes the newly described coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), has affected millions of people and led to over 1.9 million deaths worldwide by the beginning of January 2021. Several governments have opted for lockdown as one of the measures to combat the rapidly increasing number of COVID-19 cases. Academic institutions (i.e., universities, colleges, research centers and national laboratories), which are home to thousands of students, researchers, technicians, and administrative staff, have strictly followed government regulations. Due to the lockdown, the majority of academics have been facing various challenges, especially in transitioning from classroom to remote teaching and conducting research activities from a home office. This article from an early-career researchers’ perspective addresses the common challenges that academic institutions have encountered and possible strategies they have adopted to mitigate those challenges at the individual organizational level. Furthermore, we propose a framework to facilitate the handling of such crisis in any near future at the organizational level. We hope academics, policymakers and (non) government organizations across the globe will find this perspective a call to better improve the overall infrastructure of academic institutions.
Highlights
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic caused by the coronavirus severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-CoV-2 has been reported to infect more than 90 million people worldwide resulting in over 1.9 million fatalities far (World Health Organisation, 2020; Worldometer, 2020)
We propose a framework to facilitate the handling of such crisis in any near future at the organizational level
The measures we suggested here are based on our own experiences during the initial hit of COVID19
Summary
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has been reported to infect more than 90 million people worldwide resulting in over 1.9 million fatalities far (as of the beginning of January 2021) (World Health Organisation, 2020; Worldometer, 2020). Most academic institutions across the globe have closely followed the government regulations of their respective country, state and territory to maintain the safety and wellbeing of their employees and students. These regulations are formulated based on the recommendations of the WHO (World Health Organization, 2020). The greatest challenge was to move face-to-face classes, lectures, tutorials and other teaching and learning activities online in a short duration of time. This imposed a huge workload especially on the information technology (IT) departments of the universities. Defining regulations and policies to conduct online assessments and examinations effectively is another predicament during this crisis as many universities are in a nascent stage in handling online tools to conduct examinations remotely
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