COVID
If I ask you “What was the most disrupting thing happened in our lives in the past two to three years?” You would probably say “It’s the COVID pandemic”. I agree. From political, economic, socio-cultural, to environmental and humanity, this pandemic has affected every part of our lives. Most countries shut down their borders and a lot of states issued lockdown orders. Schools, educational institutions, learning centers moved their teaching and learning online. Company employees were asked to work from home. Restaurants and entertainment businesses were mandated to close their businesses. This list can go on and on. The global training and education sector has been facing disruptions at all levels since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In this book, we zoom in onto the short-term and long-term impacts of this pandemic on the training and education components of our social life, the role that ICT has played to help us continue our training and education endeavors during and post the pandemic, and what does the addition of ICT to the delivery modalities of our education and training programs mean for a leader who is responsible and held accountable for educating and training the current and future workforces. The pandemic has resulted in the unprecedented disruptions of training and education locally, nationally, and globally. It is threatening to reverse the gains we have made in the past century in access to quality education and learning across countries.
The impact of this pandemic is profound, and we are still in the process of assessing and understanding the damages. But at the same time, this pandemic has exposed pre-existing education and training challenges that have gone largely neglected for a long time, including weak educational policies, poor crisis preparedness, underdeveloped data collection infrastructures, under-resourced and inadequately prepared educators and trainers, lacking digital infrastructures, limited evidence-based teaching and learning tools, etc. Very few (if any) of the main-stream training and education systems and cultures were prepared for this radical and abrupt transformation. Most if not all education and training leaders had to turn to technology to help continue their programs in a very short period of time and without much opportunity for contingency planning. They found themselves forced into unfamiliar forms of operation and interaction, such as converting face to face education and training programs to be delivered remotely, and finding ways to keep their employees up-to-date on the knowledge and skills required to get their work done from home, often with limited to no guidance and support. 
However, there has been a shift in our focus from grieving the damages this pandemic has made to looking at this pandemic as an opportunity for digital transformation. More people are starting to see this pandemic as a catalyst to help accelerate 4IR and maybe it will even help us move into the Fifth Industrial Revolution faster. So, we should keep our focus on this very positive shift and explore the various roles a competent digital leader can play in this digital transformation process.
