Organizational Level Responses to the COVID-19 Outbreak: Challenges, Strategies and Framework for Academic Institutions

Frontiers in Communication

Surendra Babu Anantharaman¹  Meret Aeppli²  Andrea L. Popp³  Deep Jyoti Bhuyan⁴  Danielle Rushworth⁵  Gitika Srivastava⁶  Kyounglim Kang⁷  Gagandeep Singh⁸  Subhasish Das^1,10  Jagannath Biswakarma^1,11 

[1] 0Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States;1Department of Earth System Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States;2Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway;3NICM Health Research Institute, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia;Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands;Department of Chemistry, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland;Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Davis, CA, United States;Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland;Department of Environmental Geosciences, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria;Department of Environmental Science, Mizoram University (Pachhunga University College), Aizawl, India;Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland;Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Dübendorf, Switzerland;Empa, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, Dübendorf, Switzerland;

关键词: education;    electronic learning;    research;    challenges;    developing countries;    corona virus;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fcomm.2021.573585

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

Unknown