Keyword

The subordinate goal of education policies is to train people who can understand the times and world in which they live. Today, everything about education, from its methods to the role of the teacher and student, educational tools and equipment, and content, is undergoing an unavoidable change. As a direct result of today’s zeitgeist and modernism, schools and educational systems are being transformed with regard to their role, mission, function, curriculum, methods, and forms of management.

Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, forming an information society has been regarded as the main gateway to becoming an industrial society, as social and economic change is believed to only be possible through technological transformation and progressing to the information age. Industrialized society, which has changed rapidly through technological advancements, in this way has had to be reconstructed accordingly to remain up to date. Meanwhile, current education systems lack the essential tools to keep up with rapid technological innovations and changing working patterns (Caccavello, 2020).

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Industry 4.0 was implemented for an economic, social, and political order based on a form of technology-supported production and relations (World Economic Forum, 2020). Education 4.0 meanwhile was implemented to train the people who will realize this goal by receiving advanced technological training. The aim is to finally reach a super-intelligent society (i.e., Society 5.0) using digitalization and artificial intelligence.

While considered globally to be moving along its normal course in parallel to its goals, the process of technology- and artificial intelligence-supported industrialization has faced an unusual circumstance. In late 2019, the corona virus that was detected in Wuhan, China and spread rapidly, became the pandemic known as COVID-19. 2020 has been a year of global upheaval that has affected every individual, every system at work, and every implemented policy implemented. During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, disturbing news came from many countries around the world. Due to the pandemic, curfew restrictions have led many sales and services to move to the digital sphere; from global companies to SMEs, additional investment needs have emerged in this field while companies operating in the areas of technology, media, communications, software, pharmaceutical products, and retail services have grown exponentially over a short period of time in their respective not-so-competitive markets. Direct selling is the sector that has grown the most among these.

This social isolating and quarantining due to the pandemic have suddenly and deeply affected the economic order and social life on a global scale. Every institution and organization has had to make quick decisions to adapt to the changing conditions. Educational institutions have turned to rapid digitalization and online education as a temporal solution against the interruption in education.

Lamanauskas (2017) noted that students’ and youths’ experiences have varied in the field of new technologies, although their relationship with learning and teaching has yet to be fully measured. The problem is that the educational meaning and use of such services are not sufficiently known, as they have not yet been discussed. The results from various studies have demonstrated digital teaching content to improve institutional resources, strengthen student motivation, attract their interest in general, and improve their rational thinking. Thus, digital teaching-learning content has now posed itself as one of the essential aspects of education. One must agree with the fact that digital teaching tools render teaching and learning processes much more interesting and effective. One of the results from these studies is related to teachers’ technological competences. Therefore, teachers who want to help students are expected to learn, model, and facilitate the development of such competencies altogether. In analyzing the problems of this field, many fundamental questions arise that require answers.

The effects of digitalized education and this uncalled-for methodical change to online education will be examined and evaluated thoroughly in comparison with face-to-face education in terms of online education’s pedagogical dimensions, contributions, strong and weak points, advantages, and threats. The COVID-19 pandemic often saw particular online education-based solutions to be offered as a response to the urgent issues of distance education. This rapid transition period has revealed many layered issues regarding investment decisions and budget needs, internet infrastructure, technological equipment, administrators, educators, students from every education level, parents’ digital literacy, and the suitability of specific social environments to online education. Additionally, the minimum requirements for all these processes and the lack of basic principles point to a necessity. Digital literacy has become the new indicator of development and has increasingly become one of the official goals of education.

This study is the result of descriptive research. To this end, the study examines experiments on the subject and scans books and articles, evaluating the discussions and case studies in this field. Based on all these views, the study conducts a case assessment and descriptive analysis. This article discusses the role, function, method, and content of today’s education while addressing the action plans and strategies for future education in the context of Industry 4.0 and Education 4.0. Furthermore, digitalization stands as the urgent solution to many issues during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the article also addresses its effects over education, social learning processes, and the ecology of learning.

Online/Digital Education’s Effects on Teaching and Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, people who have to stay and work at home have turned to various urgent and palliative solutions, the most common of which is online education. With this method, each teacher gets in touch with their students through video conferences over the Internet at scheduled times. In order not to interrupt the usual course of education, lists about urgent needs have been prepared with this method, which was formed to be put quickly into practice. Heading the lists of urgent needs are good quality Internet infrastructure; high-speed Internet connections; various equipment for online education such as PCs, tablets, smart-phones, speakers, and earphones for every student; and digital content.

Due to the pandemic, educational practices have been carried out beyond the traditional class environment for about a year. From the list of urgent needs due to the pandemic, only the large supply of equipment for online education has been crossed off while the two other urgent needs still wait to be addressed. Undoubtedly, this condition owes its existence to the opportunity gap, methodical and pedagogical change in education, and the rapid growth of the capitalist market alongside the imbalance of supply and demand. This new condition has many sociological complexities such as new forms of global exploitation, lack of control in digital spaces, panopticism (Hope, 2018), surveillance, algorithms, and the dominance of artificial intelligence.

The COVID-19 pandemic has instigated serious policy changes in terms of making major investments in the digital sphere in countries that already have sufficient infrastructure for online education such as the United States, China, Japan, and Canada as well as EU countries such as Germany and France alongside developing and less developed countries. Meanwhile, online education in Turkey formed its infrastructure back in 2011, which has better facilitated adopting online education strategies (Ministry of National Education [MoNE], 2020).

The post-corona virus period will see virtual/online education become a necessity rather than a matter of choice. Thus, the rate of online education platforms being used with virtual classrooms has increased rapidly during the pandemic. Platforms such as Google Classroom, Moodle, JoVE, Kahoot, Pearson, Cisco Webex ClassMaster, Zoom, Adobe Connect, Age of Learning, Bloomz, CirQlive, Edhelper, G Suit for Education, Kiron, Collaborate, Teams, and TeamLink are actively being used all over the world, from elementary education all the way to post-graduate studies. Even non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have resumed their training using these virtual environments. In addition, Turkey’s Council of Higher Education (CoHE) immediately passed a legal regulation that permits 30% of education in Turkish universities to be virtual (Arkan, 2020).

China, where COVID-19 originated, quickly implemented online education and the project Suspending Classes Without Stopping Learning. Analyzing this issue, Zhou et al. (2020) tried to grasp the binary of the parent–child co-relationship in the educational process with the already existent parent–child relationship. They also tried to understand the parents who were included in the educational process during the pandemic period as active surveillants and intendants in addition to analyzing the teacher–student relationship. Suspending Classes Without Stopping Learning has provided a prominent and valuable space for families to collaborate with school in education. Students’ individual learning processes have been monitored and evaluated. Additionally, students have been presented with the opportunity to experience self-growth in collaboration with school and family by directing themselves to gain more liberty, learn independently, and plan their own schedules. Students’ individual learning capacities are found to have expanded during this particular period, as well as parent–teacher relationships to have gotten closer, and school and family education to have further integrated (p. 514).

Research emphasizing the importance of the online education process in strengthening the relation between home and school has revealed many gray areas regarding how to lead parents in mentoring their children and participating in their learning processes as well as to inform the parents on scientifically proven ways to raise children and establish healthy family relations (Hodges, 2020; Zhou et al., 2020). The most important of these gray areas are about the changes that will occur in post-pandemic learning systems. Gomaratat (2015) stated that educational systems are increasingly evolving into a system that will implement a learning process based on three areas. These three areas are grouped as follows (Öztemel, 2018, p. 28):

  • Regulate understanding—The 3Rs (Recall, Relate, Refine)

  • Trigger research—The 3Is (Inquire, Interact, Interpret)

  • Draw a conclusion—The 3Ps (Participate, Process, Present).

Although online distance education implementations offer solutions such as openness, accessibility, and flexibility in education, the HyFlex learning model has been placed in the forefront based on these implementations requiring self-directed and self-managed skills and learners getting to choose which ways to use in the “new normal” to access content. Additionally, the flexible roles the traditional educational institutions will assume in the “new normal” and learners’ efforts to gain information through different media are estimated to add much more value to informal learning processes (Bozkurt, 2020, p. 117).

In recent years, discussions have occurred emphasizing the urgency to come up with solutions and to make quick analyses for eliminating the challenges posed to teachers, students, parents, and educational institutions in the field of education with the rise of digital teaching and learning. A large body of academic work has been published in this field that serves as the groundwork for these studies, as they identify the stronger and weaker points of online education and make suggestions on how to improve the online experience. In analyzing the issues present in this field, many fundamental questions arise that require answers (Lamanauskas, 2017).

The main issue is defining the relationship between the traditional sources for learning (published textbooks) and digital content (e.g., Should digital content replace traditional textbooks? Does digital content greatly increase the effectiveness of the teaching-learning process and help achieve better results? How will the quality of teaching-learning change using digital resources?). Despite these questions and gray areas, digital tools are widely accepted to make teaching and learning processes more interesting and effective. In any case, answers based on objective data are needed, and this will create new research fields soon (Lamanauskas, 2017, pp. 131–133).

Although many local observations and quantitative studies are found on the effects of digital education, no data from an effective measurement study have been sufficiently accumulated to form a theory or affect existing theories. Many are goal-oriented and do not yet have strong pedagogical references to see what impacts may occur on the learner. The questions of what, how, how much. and how far do not have satisfactory or formal answers. A comparative study on the impact online education has on learning processes is needed to analyze the target audience’s reactions to the presented content, to the way the content is presented, and to the platform of the content. Carrying out representative research studies with encompassing policies that objectively support pedagogical studies is essential.

Digital literacy has become an extremely important phenomenon in educational policies, pedagogical formation, and research. Supporting research practices is necessary to analyze children’s cognitive abilities as they grow up, what they want to learn, how and the extent to which current educational instructions and the fields they emphasize affect children’s ways of thinking, as well as the negative effects these educational instructions may have (Lankshear & Knobe, 2006). On the other hand, current educational systems lack the essential tools to keep up with rapid technological innovations and changing working patterns (Caccavello, 2020). Centralization in education restricts freedom of education, resulting in weaker and lower-performing young employees.

The European Commission (EC, 2017) reported important notes on Education 4.0. The report states that teachers are essential factors in terms of teaching how to train people with technology, thus they need to be trained on digital education. Students may be studying full-time or part-time, may be receiving vocational education, and may come from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Mobile devices, social media, and modular study programs are several options. E-learning, blended learning, the flipped classroom model, applied learning (i.e., learning on-site), and non-stop, increased data input have become our realities.

The education of the future is being designed. In this designation, student-centered teaching methods and IT-assisted class presentations should be prioritized. Exam methods and students’ abilities should also be improved further. Like in other fields, Education 4.0 is the realization of digital transformation in the world of education. Additionally, the powerful use of educational tools in the field of Education 4.0 is an indispensable element. Teaching new technologies to help keep up with social transformations will be considered a basic need. During this period, lifelong learning will be among the main missions of educational institutions. Contributing to development and ensuring qualities such as knowledge, leadership, cooperation, creativity, digital literacy, effective communication, emotional intelligence, entrepreneurship, global citizenship, teamwork, and problem-solving skills will be some of the learning outcomes in response to the new technological-educational needs. When considering this, Education 4.0 should not be viewed as a mere educational system. Critical-analytical thinking, innovation, productivity, responsibility, multicultural information sharing, and career development will be the focal points of Education 4.0 (Öztemel, 2018, p. 27).

While teachers and students interact in the classroom environment and discuss a given day's topic according to the curriculum during school hours in the traditional education system, new forms of education have also emerged revealing that this educational model can be modified by technological and scientific advances. One of these new education systems is the flipped classroom model, which prioritizes involving students in extracurricular activities as opposed to traditional education. According to this educational model, students may complete course requirements with extracurricular activities.

Research on digital use and computational thinking is constantly evolving to support digital and non-digital educational tools in preschool learning programs. Through research conducted in this field, pedagogical responses have been made regarding what should be in the curricula in the future and how these curricula will be proposed. Digital literacy combines interaction and epistemic participation with knowledge. In this sense, digital literacy involves interacting with information. Digitalization is the reshaping of the social phenomena that affect the masses, such as human relations, economics, social movements, and politics. These relationalities ascribe power to the term digital. The ways through which this digital power might be manipulated, how it may change in the future, or how it may be beneficial to society should be explained to people and be the topic of academic discussions.

Collins and Halverson (2010) stated schools to have made invaluable contributions to the development of the world, adding that they would continue doing so in the future. After emphasizing the need for educators and policymakers to revise the relationship between school and education as education becomes a lifelong learning experience, Collins and Halverson also stated education to encompass ages starting from around 5 to 18–21, pointing at the reality of education today which mostly takes place outside school.

Meanwhile, the lifestyle in which today’s younger generation have been born into and have known no other is defined as the Carpe Diem culture, a consumer society that encourages innovation and arbitrary change (which results in restlessness). Such a society and culture has the problem of not only desire but also of extreme demand for products and services and of disposing of the old immediately as soon as the new emerges (Bauman, 2020, p. 39). Learners of the digital age find printed matter boring. All kinds of information have become shorter-lived. Speed, visuals, and entertainment are at the forefront of accessing information, while multimedia materials such as images, audio, animations, and videos are preferred for gaining information on a certain topic. The educational methods of previous generations appear insufficient for the individuals of the younger generation (Ardıç & Altun, 2017, p. 18).

The learning behaviors of individuals of the digital age are highly diverse and distinct. Approaches such as changing the methods of the educational system for the better to prevent students from dropping out, providing them with employment opportunities after graduation, and making education and the workforce market respond better to the education the young receive as well as the demands of the workforce market show that policymakers base the reason why young people drop out over the question of employment (Cansever & Namal, 2019, p. 131).

Many research studies are carried out in preschool education to ensure the cognitive development of students through the use of digital resources, and constant improvements occur in supporting digital and non-digital tools in learning programs. These studies form pedagogical responses and revisions in terms of what should be placed in future curriculum designations.

A striking correlation exists between the time spent at home during the pandemic and the rise of the use of digital tools during this period. This time has seen a rapid increase in online digital activities and time spent using the internet. Serious differences exist between genders in terms of digital activity preferences. Women spend more time with movies, TV shows, entertainment, music, and text messaging, whereas men mostly prefer sports, games, movies, and TV series.

Redefining and Reconstructing the Relationship Between School and Education

Education has important functions such as ensuring the socialization of people, changing society for the better, and matching its educational systems and methods with the particular society’s lifestyle (Er, 2000, p. 68). Education greatly contributes to social harmony when it is compatible with individual lifestyles and community values. These qualities, which should adapt to the individual, are the values desired to be acquired. Dynamic, progressive, and innovative societies allow individuals to form ideals and expectations. Here, the function of organized educational institutions comes to the surface. Educational institutions reflect the current values of society while also training individuals capable of meeting the future ideals and expectations of society (Aslan, 2001, p. 29).

Students’ motivation for learning is influenced by having emotionally healthy relations in a healthy environment, and most importantly by learning in a student-friendly environment where they are motivated to participate more during lectures, which demonstrates the importance of establishing healthy learning environments. Research shows the importance of the learning environment even for countries with the infrastructure and potency to resume education online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students missing their school, classmates, and teachers during online education hints at the importance of education environment in the pedagogical dynamics of teaching. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 2020, p. 17) emphasizes that schools must be considered a central feature of education systems at all levels as the main places of learning regarding the importance of out-of-school learning during the ongoing pandemic.

Schools are organizational forms that function as an extremely important factor in carrying out systematic educational activities. One of the fundamental functions of schools is to help students gain self-confidence and provide them with the opportunity to check what they know. In this regard, the roles teachers and students play in the process of acquiring knowledge and learning must be reversed so that the teacher also assumes the role of listener and learner. The difficulty all traditional forms of learning and teaching will face in this scenario is closely related to the fact that students can also know in forms beyond teachers’ knowledge. According to the epistemological world behind empirical-analytical knowledge and the didactic pedagogy born out of this world, no student can know more than their teacher, while the epistemological world of historical-hermeneutic understanding may verify the existence of this phenomenon. According to the understanding of critical self-thinking, however, the state of new knowledge evolves into one that excels the knowledge of the teacher and is even encouraged to excel (Lovat, 2018, p. 126).

If knowledge is acquired cumulatively and linearly, then knowledge by learning increases quantitatively. However, this way of learning also formulates new ways for individuals (even groups and societies as a whole) to grasp reality; it paves new ways of interacting with others and of perceiving their identity. Information acquired through interaction necessitates responsibility. Self-reflection teaches an individual to become aware of the ideologies that affect them. The crises to which the world had yielded in this century lead us to question the validity of linear models, while the recognition of cultural pluralities in the postmodern world view leads us to question the idea of individual identity itself. This strong new form of knowledge seems to have contributed to the crisis of identity in our society by forcing systematic education to question its purpose. The critical theory of Frankfurt School was born out of this kind of socio-cultural crisis, and Habermas’ reconstruction of the first-generation critical theory provides insight into a possible reformulation of education itself. The foundation of modernity lies in the commitment of post-Enlightenment societies to the ideals of truth, justice, freedom, rights, and virtues. From Rousseau and Kant to Dewey, the connection between education and democracy is implicit. While Durkheim published on social convention, Kant judged education to be a way to both humanize the individual and form democratic will, ultimately forming a republic world dedicated to preserving peace at all times. Discourse ethics and the concept of communicative action as Habermas coined will realize cultural transformation, help overcome current crises, and resume and develop individual and societal learning processes without losing sight of the current accomplishments of modernity (Terry, 1997, p. 278).

Research shows strong and clear relationships among social climate of schools, social learning environments, the ecology of learning, and student success (Smith & Shouppe, 2018). One long-term discussion about education has been on how to identify the concept of student success and whether this concept serves the majority in learning and assessment using the basic instrumentalist approach (direct instruction, standardized curricula, norm-based evaluation) or whether student success requires a more holistic approach (Lovat, 2018, p. 128).

Educational practitioners and researchers have become more aware of the contextual importance of where learning takes place, especially in regard to school climate and its influence on students’ academic results as well as their social and emotional states. The concept of school climate/environment is described within the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education as:

School climate is based on the subjective experiences of school life for students, staff, school leaders, parents, and the entire school community.  A school's climate reflects its norms, goals, values, interpersonal relationships, teaching and learning practices, and organizational structures. A positive school climate improves children's learning and healthy development in school. A positive school climate is also an essential component within comprehensive school improvement processes. Nonetheless, the divergence and disagreement in defining and measuring school climate in the literature are evident. There is a major interest in school climate improvement and school climate policy. However, the policy context that supports school climate varies considerably internationally and across the United States. Clarification regarding the dimensions of school climate and continued research on how a positive school climate contributes to both school and student results are important. (Berkowitz et al., 2017, pp. 1–28)

School climate is like the air we breathe: It often goes unnoticed until something goes wrong.

The UNESCO report, Education in a Post-COVID World, names nine ideas for future education. Among these recommendations is one regarding schools and their social learning environment:

We must preserve the social spaces provided by schools while transforming education. The school is indispensable as a physical space. Traditional classroom organization must give way to various methods of 'doing school', but the school as a separate space-time of collective living, specific and different from other spaces of learning must be preserved. (UNESCO, 2020, p. 6)

In its broadest sense, school climate refers to all the characteristics of the school environment that influence students’ academic and social development (MacGibeny, 2016). A carefully constructed school climate is known to increase student achievement and reduce problematic behavior in students; it has been widely studied both empirically and theoretically. The Systems View of School Climate (SVSC) has been proposed to best assist efforts in developing the causal models that explain how school climate works. This theoretical framework was formed by deconstructing previous models and transforming empirical research on school climate into themes and clarifying the implicit assumptions around it. This school climate, which uses SVSC to synthesize the existing literature, is defined as the affective and cognitive perceptions regarding the social interactions, relationships, values, and beliefs of students, teachers, administrators, and staff within a school. School climate is situated within ecological systems theory to guide future research in this domain and help specify the levels of research or analysis, thus providing utility as a theoretical framework for future causal models. SVSC provides a road-map for research by demarcating school climate from its related constructs, making suggestions related to contextual and structural constructs, and delineating proximal and distal systems that can shape the nature of school climate (Rudasill et al., 2018).

Information society, Education 4.0, and the changing roles, functions, and climate of schools due to the pandemic with the implementation of new educational practices all necessitate the integration of new professions into education and training processes within education management. Within the context of social learning environment and ecology in the early 1970s, employing school sociologists was brought to the agenda in the belief that they are as necessary as school counselors. The famous sociologist Sklar has indicated now is the time for sociologists to become useful members of school communities (school organizations) and to help resolve the issues being faced today (as cited in Bayhan, 2015, p. 261). However, the desired developments in this domain have not yet been achieved. Having been constricted by the social and philosophical foundations of education for years, this domain has recently assumed a broader sociology-based form that promotes research on issues relating to students, schools, and their environment.

In the conceptualization of school culture, culture as a word has its roots in developing and growing something. In this regard, the careful training of people lies at the core of the definition of school. Culture describes a common lifestyle with its implicit and explicit agreements. A school’s contribution to socialization cannot be denied. In terms of education management and educational processes, school sociologists will assume an essential role in the matters affecting the social learning environment and student motivation, such as students’ socialization process, friendships, peer-student and school–family relations and interactions, schooling, the school’s social environment, eliminating factors that disturb school culture (e.g., violence, student gangs, substance abuse), and discipline (Bayhan, 2015, pp. 264–268).

School climate engenders a culture that indicates how a given school improves and embraces differences. Reflecting the culture of a school community, school climate and culture have profound impacts on students’ achievement and behavioral development. Thus, the school will help shed certain toxic characteristics of a child and replace them with motivation for learning with the help of a positive environment (Lindstorm & Drolet, 2017). When schools equate to learning, they exclusively focus on what falls in and out of the curriculum, as well as additional resources, recommendations, and supplements. Thicker books have been produced and school hours extended to adapt to the diversification of informational resources (Collins & Halverson, 2010, p. 20).

The school will never disappear, but its role and function in learning are expected to narrow down and get redefined. The classroom environment is difficult to replace in terms of aspects such as measuring students’ levels of understanding, the effects of competition in the classroom on learning and student success, how students overcome anxiety and gain self-expression, the holistic presentation of a physical classroom, participatory discussions, and group work. Discipline in schools is tacitly accepted to undergo a more relaxed process with digitalization. While the new processes are open to constructive opportunities that may give individuals the chance to transform themselves, these new processes may also lead to destructive measures being taken. Therefore, individuals must develop new ways of perceiving and thinking. To adapt to changing conditions, they must find paths to explore new ways of living. Nevertheless, the role and function of the school as a pedagogical and social environment should never be undermined in terms of its contributions to behavioral development, provision of values education, and promotion of art, sports, painting, and music, and development of children’s talents.

Schools offer a state of praxis that contains complex levels of knowledge. Terry (1997, p. 275) placed great emphasis on culture, mentioning that education traditionally functions as a mechanism of social reproduction and cultural preservation in many contexts. According to Terry, culture is a vibrant phenomenon that constantly changes. Educators should respond to the new conditions brought about by these changes by encouraging students to ponder upon these cultural conditions and assist their development through this process of thinking. In particular, Terry emphasized that educators should come up with an approach and methodology to make culture suit students, not themselves.

The Future of Education: The Roles, Functions, Learning Processes, Models, and Methods of Learning-Teaching and Ecology of Learning

During the pandemic, global digitalization in education and the transition to online education had to be implemented without any preparation or prior testing. The experience of teaching during this process foreshadows the necessity of blending traditional education with distance/digital/online education to establish a hybrid education model that will function more healthily in the future. Thus, after the pandemic, we can neither go back to the traditional education model nor resume a strictly online education. Each country should also take global trends and needs into account in developing a teaching-learning model also suitable to their gradual transition processes. Universities in particular should carry out a series of academic research using a functional structuralist approach to thoroughly inspect and analyze the online education that has been implemented urgently due to unforeseen circumstances while taking into account the aforementioned dimensions.

COVID-19 has had serious consequences regarding the reshaping of educational perspectives; the reevaluation of the necessary educational technologies; the design of distance education courses; the assessment and evaluation of student performance; digital data and ethics; newly emerged educational roles; digital competencies; skills; conversion, and division; the philosophy of openness in education; social equality; preventing and treating trauma and anxiety disorders; the pedagogy of care, understanding, and empathy; and inspecting economic dimensions of higher education with support groups and mechanisms (Bozkurt, 2020, p. 112).

As a direct result of today’s Zeitgeist and modernism, schools and educational systems will transform their role, mission, function, curriculum, methods, and forms of management. Over time, serious differences will occur in schools’ role and function in terms of education and training. Teaching will take place in digital space through different modules and package programs, while assessment and evaluation of student performance, accreditation, and certification will also mostly occur online. While the current education system forms itself based on this situation, school as a social learning environment most probably will be reshaped with a functional mission in mind in terms of behavior, morality, values, culture, civilization, history, arts, sports, developing talents, teamwork, students’ social and psychological development, and improving analytical thinking.

Influential in many fields, Industry 4.0 is the application process of traditional manufacturing and industrial practices. Education is one of these affected fields. The rapid development of technologies and the growing need to integrate them into teaching obliges teachers to keep up with new technologies and design the pedagogical implementation of new technologies (Dong et al., 2020). Digital learning has become an issue concerning teachers’ digital literacy, more so than that of students due to a lack of interest and knowledge in the “digital information network” (Çiftçi et al., 2020, pp. 126–127). Yet, we undeniably need to train the labor force to design, develop, produce, and use the produced technology in all fields necessary for Industry 4.0. Industry 4.0 needs individuals with high-level cognitive skills using methods that require not only knowledge but careful thinking. Educating individuals in all fields to perceive and define global problems correctly (critical thinking), produce innovative ideas as a solution (creative thinking), and use the proper methods and techniques to solve the problems (scientific and analytical thinking) is of utmost importance. This is an issue that needs to be addressed in a broad perspective and thought concerning other parts including preschool, primary, secondary, and higher education as well as lifelong learning (Öztemel, 2018, p. 27).

The European Commission (EC) carried out comprehensive research between February and September 2020 regarding how to compensate for the interruption in education due to the COVID-19 pandemic and what to do to make up for it. Using a participatory method, the draft was made accessible for informing and evaluating member countries and the public, receiving a total of 2,700 ideas and suggestions by consulting all parties involved (EC, 2020a, p. 5). Taking this research as a reference point, the European Union has adopted the Digital Education Action Plan (2021–2027) to reorganize education and training. This action plan draws attention to the transformations in work, daily life, and labor force market through many aspects over the last ten years with the rapid digitalization, as well as the hardships employers from various sectors have gone through due to the insufficiency of digital literacy (EC, 2020a, p. 2). Another action plan, Skills for Industry Curriculum Guidelines 4.0, has a special place on the European Union agenda and has been prepared and put into practice to position Europe on a higher step in terms of industrial competitiveness in order for Europe to have more sustainable growth, create work opportunities, prepare road-maps for improving social welfare, and harmonize the technological investments required for a high industry with human resources (EC, 2020b, p. 21). The essence of the action plan involves the actions and lifelong learning philosophy summarized as “the re-alignment of the educational and training systems with the industry and institutional reconstruction by industry” combined with the motto “the society of tomorrow is the curriculum today” (EC, 2020b, p. 156). According to the report, robotics and other automation technologies, including technologically advanced manufacturing and material processing equipment and machines, have increased their potential and broadened the scope of their potential implementations to low budget, APR, and SME-friendly production opportunities.

Both within the context of Education 4.0 and Industry 4.0, some research fields and topics considered necessary for identifying and defining the new situation caused by the pandemic and also for building the economic and social order of the future might be listed as follows:

  • The purpose, tools, and methods of education, as well as the goals and roles of the school and teacher, need to be reconsidered within the context of the transformation of education and training.

  • The education–school–teacher–student relationship should be redefined and reconstructed. Teachers’ roles must be the support and facilitation of the learning processes, and students should be given a central role both in education and training processes (EC, 2020b, p. 156).

  • Schools should continue being the central figure of educational systems at all levels as the main place of learning (UNESCO, 2020, p. 17).

  • Teacher training should be reconsidered from the beginning following the needs of the time and future action plans, and an academic structure should be formed to this end.

  • Studies regarding the pedagogy, tools, and policies of face-to-face, online, and hybrid education should be carried out in universities, and curricula should be revised in their entirety with respect to face-to-face, online, and hybrid education.

  • Education needs to be rebuilt around learning and not around teaching (EC, 2020b, p. 156).

  • Digital learning/teaching content should be adapted to the new curriculum and suit learners’ various developmental stages.

  • Digital space and the Internet have facilitated access to information, resulting in diversity and a multiplicity of informational resources. First and foremost, the impacts of information pollution and data problems on educational processes should be identified and carefully handled.

  • The coeducation of families and school should be redetermined according to families’ contributions and involvement in education.

  • The procedures for becoming a teacher and getting promoted in this profession should be redesigned.

  • Learning forms such as autonomous learning, planning, and independent learning should be included in the process of education, and assessment-evaluation tools should be developed accordingly.

  • Pedagogy should be developed based on the parent–child relationship in education through parents’ role in actively supervising and managing children.

  • Modules should be developed for parents to receive training in fields such as guidance, how to participate in the learning process, scientific methods for raising children, and creating harmonious family relations.

  • The technological infrastructure of education should be strengthened, virtual/online educating skills mastered, and their capacity constantly increased (Arkan, 2020).

  • When education is stopped, efforts and in-service training practices should be greatly emphasized to ensure that teachers adapt to innovations.

  • Digital literacy must be made a major topic of discussion.

  • Education should have all kinds of digital content production, control, approval, and publication processes.

  • Accreditation mechanisms concerning the impact, contribution, and quality of traditional teaching-learning content (textbooks) and digital teaching-learning content should be developed.

  • Tools and methods for assessment and evaluation should be reviewed and updated.

  • The importance of the school environment and school culture and the collectivity of education should be underpinned by pedagogical, psychological, and sociological research.

  • Research in universities should center around studies addressing distance, digital, and online education with all their dimensions; therefore, new research centers should be established within the Faculties of Education and supported financially.

  • Teaching-learning styles and models should be supported by up-to-date research.

  • SWOT analyses should be reconstructed and reintegrated into the new system by contrasting various learning models and methods (such as collaborative learning, mobile learning, self-regulated learning, inverted learning, problem-based learning, constructivist learning, HyFlex learning, Gregorc and Kolb learning, 5E-7E learning, e-learning, process-based learning, active learning, blended learning, integrative learning, self-directed learning, and self-managed learning).

  • Teaching-learning models should be extensively included in the teacher training systems.

  • Future teaching-learning forms and educational models should be developed on the axis of the goals, expectations, demands, and dreams of Generation Z, who constitute the human resources of the future.

  • The impact of rapid digitalization and increase in screen time on body health (obesity, bulimia nervosa, and anorexia nervosa; Bauman, 2020, p. 11), mental health (technostress, nomophobia, phone addiction, social anxiety, social isolation, and antisocial personality disorders, as well as pathologies such as fatigue and insomnia), as well as the psycho-social problems this impact causes (Bağcı, 2016, p. 1035), need to be studied, and solutions should be developed against these negative outcomes.

  • The Individual, psychological, and physiological aspects, layers, and effects of overload and overflow of information should be carefully researched (Neuman, 2018, pp. 107–115).

  • Sociologist reading should be carried out on the social segment knowns as Neither in Employment nor Education and Training (NEET).

  • Extracurricular activities should be replanned and re-managed.

  • Students should be encouraged to perform activities and use additional modules to support their creativity within the context of personalized education, which has increasing importance (Ardıç & Altun, 2017, p. 26).

Digital Education Action Plan of the European Commission of 2020 revealed how much help parents need to assist their children during the process of online and distance education that had been hurriedly implemented due to pandemic, how parents remain insufficient in terms of contributing to the ways their children spend their free time, and the need to transform educational understanding in accordance with the necessities of the digital age (EC, 2020a, p. 6). This situation indicates that traditional education and distance/online education have non-interchangeable roles and functions.

Although many successful as well as unsuccessful applications have occurred in the hurried distance education process, one of the biggest controversies and shortcomings was experienced regarding the assessment and evaluation processes of student performance. Educational institutions’ sudden transition to online education due to the COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated temporarily suspending assessment processes based on a pass/fail system or holding online exams without sufficient validity or credibility instead of the traditional exams. However, another fact that comes to light with this situation is that almost all educational processes are structured around results-oriented assessment and evaluation approaches while process-oriented assessment and evaluation approaches are not sufficiently used. As a probable result of digitalization, the analytics of learning or alternative solutions allowing for process-oriented assessment and evaluation will likely be used soon (Bozkurt, 2020, p. 121).

Another striking research and descriptive analysis proved the presence of technostress in teachers (Nimrod, 2020; Wang et al., 2020). Because some teachers are not accustomed to online education, they have to deal with psychological problems such as anxiety, tension, and anger. Additionally, the discipline of a traditional classroom environment may not be maintainable in online education, resulting in unwanted behaviors being observed in students such as undisciplined behavior, non-compliance with deadlines, and insensitivity (Çiftçi et al., 2020, p. 126). In online and distance education, technostress is a big factor causing problems such as lack of focus, tolerance, anger control, and attention (Kuday, 2020).

Education systems that fail to focus on understanding, research, and producing results can in no way meet the expectations for future human resources. This failure to transform result in the phenomenon of the emergence of a young unemployed group that is Neither in Employment nor Education and Training (NEET, as defined by ILO, 2005); Turkey has yet to find a unified concept to express this, instead finding the various abbreviations of NEIY, NE-NE, or NE-NI (Bauman, 2020, p. 73). NEET describes youths who are not enrolled in any kind of educational institution while also not showing any effort to seek work or participate in youth employment; namely, they are not involved in the labor force (Cansever & Namal, 2019, p. 112). Many observe a global generation about to emerge that is inactive and not interested in employment. The presence of this NEET social segment is in itself a great indicator of the deep inequality of opportunity, while also being a notable sociological manifestation of an increasingly bohemian outlook on life. The NEET group should be considered a minefield, a dangerous space that will place serious risk on countries’ future; thus, NEET should also be seen as a problem related to future survival, socio-economic peace, and welfare (Ulusoy, 2020). In the upcoming period, human resources, especially professions, will change shape and quality, while technological literacy, adaptation, and ability to adapt will produce either stunning or devastating results such as being included or excluded from the process of transformation. Setting out a human resources management policy and action plan to analyze the whole process will alleviate the devastating impacts.

Regarding another aspect, the rapid and uncontrolled growth of digital space has led to a discussion on the limits of modern surveillance. Endless and automatic observation of individuals’ daily lives has led to a great increase in the use of classification systems. Individuals may not realize they are the object of surveillance; more importantly, they probably don’t understand how citizen, employee, or consumer profiles are kept in databases on networks (Hope, 2018, p. 70), or they simply do not care. The digital footprint of any individual who connects to the Internet and carries out a task is not deemed important. However, constructing people’s profiles by analyzing the information obtained from their ordinary actions through algorithms is a violation of the preservation of personal data. In this context, noting the presence of surveillance in studies aiming to achieve digital literacy within the education system is necessary. Surveillance culture is the provision of individual and student behavior in terms of controlling, socializing, normalizing, adapting, and assisting students on self-regulation (Bauman, 2020, p. 76). However, the entire online space has the structure of a panopticon with a “central watchtower which continuously sees the individual without being seen as the surveillant” (Hope, 2018, p. 65). This condition should be examined carefully by modern social theory in terms of how the individual becomes subject to this procedure, standardized, and objectified.

Conclusion

The future is no longer a bright and promising time for many of us. The future is a point of concern with a series of challenges to overcome that need to be constantly managed now. The now revolves around eliminating future threats (Bauman, 2007, p. 38). Schools as an institution, a social system with students, parents, teachers, and administrators, will adopt an institutional order to guide the narcissistic and alienated individual of the global neo-liberal order more than it had previously guided. With the Socratic motto of “Know thyself” as its groundwork, the counseling system will be strengthened by sociologists analyzing the society and culture and implementing counseling activities by keeping the thought of the individual among society in mind (Bayhan, 2015).

The new global state due to the pandemic has generated many discussions around the concepts of school, teacher, information, education, learning, assessment, and evaluation and revealed the emergence of new forms to be inevitable. In this regard, several new strategies, action plans, and pilot implementation studies on new forms of formal education will be set in 2021. Secondary education will need to increase the digital literacy of educators and form new specialties integrated into education more than before. These specialties will be mainly IT (software and hardware) specialists, data analysts, content analysts, and data miners, as well as event managers, training coaches, school sociologists, science, culture, art, and sports experts.

One of the biggest observations during the pandemic has been the comparisons between distance education and face-to-face education (Kvashko, 2020). When approached critically from this point, the indicators of success are questionable for most universities in Turkey, as is also the quality of education and educational materials. Therefore, comparing distance and face-to-face education forms an artificial basis for discussion. From this point of view, the main focus of education, whether distance or face-to-face, should be to have quality assurance in the presentation of both education and educational content. Distance education is not a mere structure or a single pedagogical approach; it is a systematic approach consisting of several different learning materials, forms of communication, and interrelated parts serving a specific purpose. Resuming education online requires a systematic and preplanned understanding. To have the right balance in distant education, to run technology and pedagogy in a meaningful way for effective and efficient learning, and to ensure meaningful learning experiences are all equally important. Examples of the common use of technology include using learning management systems, live lesson tools, or digital environments. Although learning management systems are effective at providing content to the masses, they also have certain limitations in the context of supporting social learning processes and forming an ecology of learning. Within this context, the need to design teaching-learning with concepts such as blended learning and reversed learning is important in the context of having effective learning outcomes for maximum learner satisfaction (Bozkurt, 2020, pp. 118–119).

The intensive and rapid shift to working from home during the pandemic has led to serious changes in home and family dynamics, roles, and responsibilities. Pedagogues and families are concerned about the security and nourishment of children, especially for working families who spend more time outside school; their children receive online education at home and are mostly alone in an uncontrolled space. The conflicts and problems that might be caused by the increase in work-from-home practices and online education in our business life will become clearer over time. Whether this domain will function to the desired extent and effect is unclear, especially for the planning and management of extracurricular activities that students will perform.

Education’s shift to the digital sphere has led to the emergence of discussions related to political, economic, and cultural hegemony and authoritarianism (Morozov, 2011, p. xvi). Digital space not being mono-centric and uncontrolled leads to aggressive and restrictive measures being taken; this in turn leads other ontological questions to arise. Discourses that argue the evolution of future technology to necessitate an evolution of public order are increasing.

The traditional, sociological, philosophical, and pedagogical debate that digital-online education would never replace traditional face-to-face education is also growing. In particular, many dimensions of the digital field, which is mainly seen as a field of unlimited freedom, have gone unnoticed such as the drop in the quality of information and information pollution due to the uncontrolled space of the net. Neuman (2018, pp. 108–111) focused on “the exponential growth of information” and the information environment's hegemonic effect on the human brain, drawing attention to the following issues from Marjorie Connelly’s (2020) article in the New York Times “More Americans Sense a Downside to an Always Plugged-In Existence.” Some adverse effects of the age of information and digitalization have occurred such as digital tools depriving the brain of the time needed to rest, technology causing impatience and forgetfulness, the price paid for getting addicted to plugged-in devices, how visuals and audios control our lives, the mess caused by data overload, the lack of time management, and attention deficiencies.

In the work The Dark Side of the Internet, Morozov (2011, p. 28) emphasized the lack of control in the digital sphere, noting that “most policymakers instead choose sleepwalking through this digital minefield, refusing to face all the counter evidence by whistling their favorite cyber-utopian melodies.”

A fundamental problem exists that is caused by the disagreement between a paradigm of proficiency and competence toward a certain goal in the educational field and the pedagogy-centered paradigm. In face-to-face education, arts, sports, culture, behavior, values education, personality and character development, socialization, and social interaction come to fore, while only teaching and teaching techniques are emphasized in online education.

The ongoing pandemic has once again revealed schools to be a social learning environment and climate to have extremely valuable functions due to school providing children and young people with a safe environment where they can take risks, see several possibilities, and discover and realize new goals. School is the key to opening the door for students on their way to becoming the person they wish to become. Most importantly, schools also offer a humanitarian environment, enabling both self-learning and learning with others (UNESCO, 2020, p. 16).

This study describes the results of urgent distance-online education practices implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic and the phenomenon of digitalization. Policy makers, theorists, educational institutions, educators, learners, and parents in particular as well as all other sections of society should pay due attention to the preparation of action plans and new strategic plans by taking into account the need for social and economic order. A new balance should be established between online and face-to-face education through comprehensive and extensive analyses and studies concerning all methods for training and teaching, methods of education for training teachers, the processes one has to go through to become a teacher, all curricula, tools and systems for learning management, assessment and evaluation systems and tools, social learning processes, school climate, and the ecology of learning. Distance/online/digital education, which has become an educational phenomenon with the pandemic, should have its weaker aspects developed (i.e., the lack of management culture and of an organizational structure that allows effective management of virtual education processes; Arkan, 2020). However, under the intense digital bombardment of information, “optimizing human capacity of positioning and benefiting from information” (Neuman, 2018, p. 113) stands as another question that needs to be urgently addressed.

In summary, the value of creating information within educational formats, social learning processes, and ecology of learning should not be overlooked, notwithstanding the efficiency of accessing information on the net with the rise of digital spheres.