The Covid-19 Pandemic and the New Age of Higher Education: the Experience of Bulgaria

Abstract

Education is a fundamental right and the COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic and disruptive impact on all involved in education. During that period measures constantly influence universities in all sorts of manners. This article aims to review and synthesize the findings of the international literature related to the impact of COVID-19 on higher education at global level and on that base to describe and analyze the measures implemented by the government and the higher education community in Bulgaria. It does not aim by any means to present in details the situation in different regions or countries of the world. In general, with the outbreak of the crisis academic teaching was catapulted into the virtual world and thus it entered into a new age. Therefore, the time frame of the research article is limited to the 2020-2021 period and its scope covers the key theme identified with the impact of COVID-19 on higher education institutions in the broad sense, including all areas of universities, and challenges faced by these institutions across the world to enter into the new age of education. A special focus of the research is the approach followed in Bulgaria, as in many other countries in the world, to accelerate and adopt online and distance learning models, to introduce necessary measures and to make the best use of available resources, tools and teaching strategies. The findings suggest that the emergency solutions adopted are to be considered as innovative, useful and successful although it will take time to find out how the quality of learning has been affected by the shift from face-to-face to hybrid and to online teaching. Obviously, there are some important lessons that have to be learned so that we can try to repair the damage caused by COVID-19’s interruptions to core academic activities – teaching and learning.