COVID-19 diaries of higher education during the shocking pandemic

Abstract

The ongoing pandemic due to SARS CoV2 is really a big one, which would never welcomed from any countries anytime, but knocked the door all of a sudden! The SARS CoV-2 first appeared in China in late December 2019. The virus isolated on January 7, 2020; the disease named as COVID-19 afterwars. Since this was a SARS virus not an influenza, nobody seem to expect it as a pandemic agent, spread so fast and so globally. But actually it did spread to many countries and declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020. The pandemic hit the universities hard. The most important topic for universities during the pandemic was of course distance and remote learning, which become widespread already. The pandemic will cause profound impacts and changes on the higher education system around the world in terms of education-teaching methods, research, internationalization and mobility. The response of Council of Higher Education of Turkey to pandemic could be evaluated in four phases: 1) Close monitoring, 2) Preparing, 3) Action, 4) New normalization. In this paper we will review the response of Turkish higher education institutions and Council of Higher Education to the COVID-19 pandemic.