Effects of COVID 19 for Sustainable Education, Systems and Institutions

Dear colleagues,

Every crisis brings challenges and threats to employees and their organizations, regardless of whether itis initiated by human behavior, natural disasters or economic mechanisms (Doern et al., 2019). One such example of a crisis that we are all acutely familiar with is the coronavirus (so-called COVID-19) that, the end of December 2019, started spreading from Wuhan, China, to other countries all around the world so widely and quickly that on 11 March, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO, 2020) declared it a pandemic. As a response to this crisis and in order to mitigate the spread of coronavirus and save lives, governments in affected countries imposed desperate measures of social distancing, widespread lockdown, and restrictions on traveling, movements, and people gatherings.

COVID-19 has obviously affected many different sectors of our normal life, including for example the entrepreneurial engagement of self-employed persons, with some entrepreneurs having to close their businesses temporarily as a result of governmental restrictions, and others having to impose precautions and to run their activities in a reduced capacity. As the pandemic lingered on, innovative solutions became necessary in all aspects of entrepreneurial endeavor, and it took time before entrepreneurs were able to orient themselves in this new situation and governments started helping them out with policy actions aiming to deliver information, advisory, and financial support (Kuckertz et al., 2020; Turner and Akinremi, 2020).

Entrepreneurs were not the only ones affected by this crisis, though. As research has shown, pandemics can influence many aspects of daily life, including traditional entrepreneurial decision-making processes (Chell, 2013), communication and conflict management (Aldairany et al., 2018), well-being (Stephan, 2018), entrepreneurial outcomes (Wach et al., 2016), and educational institutions. A large number of these aspects of private and public life had to be moved online (Liguori and Winkler, 2020), including schools and educational systems, which were all closed and started distance education via internet-based methodologies. Unfortunately, the Internet is not a convenient solution for every facet of education; lots of institutions and employees were not ready to teach online classes, and several educational issues emerged.

Distance education, in a pandemic or not, plays an important role in the lives of individuals with the opportunities it offers to individuals of all ages. Distance education provides users with the ability to study and learn at their own pace and in their own space, and it is a facilitator for both academicians and students. Although distance education has generally received many positive reactions and is increasingly preferred by individuals and institutions, however, education is a system that—regardless of the form it takes—demands serious structural support over time. As such, distance education needs serious technological and infrastructural preparations. However, these preparations are not always sufficient for an effective educational process. Creating a distance education system which is efficient, healthy, and sufficient and does not cause trouble also requires experience. Even if it takes all the necessary preparations, if an institution does not have any experience in carrying out distance education, then problems will keep popping up.

Disparities in distance education became more evident in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the primary concerns of governments around the world was that coronavirus would disrupt the learning process of those in education, and for this reason, educational institutions in various countries switched to distance learning. However, not every country or every institution was ready to move their educational systems to distance education. Thus, even if the pandemic has been experienced in much the same way everywhere, albeit to different degrees, the opportunities to continue learning online and maintain the status quo in education in this way have definitely not been the same, and the COVID-19 lockdown has severely affected educational systems around the world.

This Special Issue aims to capture the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on educational systems and institutions at different kinds of levels, to accumulate knowledge of the best individual and policy-initiated practices helping academicians, principals, and teachers to overcome the crisis at educational institutions. We will try to understand educational processes all over the world and the social, educational, and psychological effects of schools, students, and teachers. Moreover, we will try to search best practices and applications about distance education used during this process to improve the educational effectiveness of the educational system and institutions.

Possible Topics:

The Guest Editors encourage submissions of theoretical and empirical contributions investigating the challenges and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic at educational institutions. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

1. Impact of pandemics on educational activity at national, regional or sectoral levels
2. Crisis management and best practices in educational systems
3. Doing schooling via distance education during pandemics: best practices and worst examples
4. Charting the challenges facing most endangered groups of private schools and their responses to survival
5. Capturing the influence of pandemics across types of self-employment in schools
6. Managing universities during the COVID-19 crisis: challenges and conflicts
7. Influence of pandemics on entrepreneurial well-being and outcomes
8. Entrepreneurship and innovation in times of the COVID-19 crisis at educational systems
9. New educational methodologies developed during COVID-19 by teachers and academicians for online classes
10. How school principals reacted to solve crises in educational systems
11. How stakeholders of education systems where affected during COVID-19
12. How new educational systems will be developed after COVID-19

References:

Aldairany, S., Omar, R. and Quoquab, F. (2018), "Systematic review: entrepreneurship in conflict and post conflict", Journal of Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies, Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 361-383.

Bullough, A., and Renko, M. (2013), "Entrepreneurial resilience during challenging times", Business Horizons, Vol. 56 No. 3, pp. 343-350.

Chell, E. (2013), "Review of skill and the entrepreneurial process. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research", Vol. 19 No. 1, pp. 6-31.

Doern, R., Williams, N., and Vorley, T. (2019), "Special Issue on entrepreneurship and crises: business as usual? An introduction and review of the literature", Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, Vol. 31 No. 5-6, pp. 400-412.

Hamutoğlu, N. B., Sezen-Gültekin, G., Savaşçı, M., & Bağcı, M. (2019). Yükseköğretim Öğrencilerinin Transaksiyonel Uzaklık Algısı ve Yaşam Boyu Öğrenme Eğilimleri (Transactional Distance Perception and Lifelong Learning Trends of Higher Education Students), The Journal of Trakia University Education Faculty, 9(2), 302-325.

Kuckertz, A., Brändle, L., Gaudig, A., Hinderer, S., Morales, A., Prochotta, A., Steinbrink, K., & Berger, E. S. (2020), "Startups in Times of Crisis–A Rapid Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic", Journal of Business Venturing Insights. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbvi.2020.e00169

Liguori, E., and Winkler, C. (2020), "From Offline to Online: Challenges and Opportunities for Entrepreneurship Education Following the COVID-19 Pandemic", Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy. https://doi.org/10.1177/2515127420916738.

Stephan, U. (2018). Entrepreneurs’ mental health and well-being: A review and research agenda. Academy of Management Perspectives, 32(3), 290-322.

Turner, J., & Akinremi, T. (2020), "The Business Effects of Pandemics – A Rapid Literature Review", Enterprise Research Centre, available at: https://www.enterpriseresearch.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ERC-Insight-The-business-effects-of-pandemics-%E2%80%93-a-rapid-literature-review-Final.pdf (accessed 27 April 2020).

Wach, D., Stephan, U., & Gorgievski, M. (2016), "More than money: Developing an integrative multi-factorial measure of entrepreneurial success", International Small Business Journal, Vol. 34 No. 8, pp. 1098-1121.

World Health Organization - WHO (2020), "WHO Timeline - COVID-19", available at: https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/27-04-2020-who-timeline---covid-19 (accessed 27 April 2020).

Prof. Dr. Osman Titrek
Prof. Dr. Michele Biasutti
Guest Editors

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