Leading Learning During a Time of Crisis. Higher Education Responses to the Global Pandemic of 2020
Authors: Reimers Fernando M. , Marmolejo Francisco 
Published: October 2021

The rapid disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic in multiple sectors and areas of daily life provide a unique opportunity to study the university’s capacity to respond to changes in the external environment, to be a learning organization, in service of addressing significant social challenges. In this book we study universities’ responses to one such challenge: the disruption to educational opportunities caused by the interruption of schooling brought about by the pandemic.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, universities innovated on several fronts. Unsurprisingly, some of those innovations focused on internal actions implemented to mitigate the impact of the pandemic by transitioning to online teaching delivery or extension of semester break, etc. (Crawford J et al. J Appl Learning Teaching 3.1:1–20, 2020; Leon-Garcia F, Cherbowski-Lask A, Leadership responses to COVID 19: a global survey of college and university leadership. International Association of Universities – Santander Universities. IAUP. https://www.iaup.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IAUP-Santander_Survey_to_COVID-19_Report2020.pdf, 2020). Beyond the solutions to mitigate the pandemic’s impact on their communities of students, faculty, or staff, universities also innovated to mitigate such impact on the larger community. While the contributions of universities to alleviate the pandemic’s impact have been most visible in public health (Daniels, R. J. 2020. Universities’ Vital Role in the Pandemic Response. Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health Magazine. https://magazine.jhsph.edu/2020/universities-vital-role-pandemic-response), they have extended to other areas of relief and support as well. Almost half of universities participating in a global survey conducted by the International Association of Universities indicated that due to the pandemic, their community engagement had increased (Marinoni G et al. The impact of Covid-19 on higher education around the world. IAU global survey report. International Association of Universities, Paris. https://www.iau-aiu.net/IMG/pdf/iau_covid19_and_he_survey_report_final_may_2020.pdf, 2020).

This book is a study of one such response of universities to the pandemic which has not yet received sufficient attention: their support of schools at the pre-collegiate level through a variety of innovative approaches to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on opportunity to learn.

In this chapter, we argue that studying such innovations provides insight into the responsiveness of universities to complex societal needs and into their capacity to operate as learning organizations open to their external environment. We introduce the study, explain its value in understanding the role and nature of higher education’s outreach, social impact, and capacity to deal with complex challenges, and summarize the chapters of the book and the results of a survey which was administered to over one-hundred universities to study the nature of their collaborations with schools during the first 9 months of the pandemic, between March and December of 2020.