Optimistic Outlook on the Impact of Covid-19 on Higher Education

Abstract

The education system is immensely vulnerable to Covid-19 and its consequences. As the complex global pandemic brought on lockdowns in all spheres of our life, the education system turned out to be unprepared for many of the challenges and disruptions it faced. However, like the two sides of the same coin, the pandemic also brought some positive changes. For instance, Ukraine made a digitization breakthrough in society. Second, the country appeared ready for online teaching and learning even during the Russian invasion. Since negativity is a nearly impassable barrier to success, we present a positive take on the pandemic’s impact and focus on the challenges ahead.

No education system can be better than another with a teacher. However, we have no choice in situations like Covid-19 or war, so our task now is to maintain a high quality of education under any circumstances.

Nowadays, constant adaptation has become a new must-have skill. Therefore, we analysed the post-pandemic challenges and singled out the priority steps to overcome their consequences:

• building strengths of distance education to meet the students’ and employers’ expectations of graduates’ proficiency;

• adapting the curricula to online teaching;

• providing teacher refresher courses organized by IT companies;

• helping students become confident users of the technologies and innovations and leaving no one behind;

• searching the ways to overcome the discrepancy between the need of increasing academic mobility and the restrictions imposed by pandemics or any other emergencies;

• promoting the internalization of scientific research;

• charting a course for the development of higher education in a rapidly changing world.