Introduction for Special ISSUE COVID-19 and the Resilience of Higher Education Institutions
Introduction for Special ISSUE COVID-19 and the Resilience of Higher Education Institutions

Summary/Abstract: During the COVID-19 pandemic, a process of reshaping the activities of higher education institutions (HEIs) took place, more abruptly in what concerns the first pillar of the universities (teaching), and more gradually in what concerns their second one (research) and the third stream activities. Regardless of the mission, in the first months of the pandemic the emphasis was on emergency and crisis management and, later on, the attention shifted to quality management and improvement (Cirlan and Loukkola, 2021). The issue of quality in any academic domain was quickly becoming an imperative, right after ensuring safety in academic activities and administrative organization of activities. Scholars, for example, operate a conceptual difference between the emergency remote education from spring 2020 and online learning, urging to see the first as “a quick and temporary response to a crisis, whereas the latter is planned and grounded in theoretical and practical knowledge specific to the field” (Bozkurt et al., 2020, p. 2). If specialists can see, retroactively, essential differences between the two – at the conceptual level, in higher education institutions, as everywhere, probably, in educational institutions, the transition from the first form to the second has been almost unnoticed to some, under pressure from pandemic restrictions.

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