香港六合彩中特网

Professor Tatiana Fumasoli used the 香港六合彩中特网 Global Engagement Funds to understand how universities responded to the Covid-19 crisis, and what lessons can be learned in the face of future crises.

In 2020, individuals, businesses and higher education institutions across the world experienced one of the most difficult, uncertain and unstable periods since World War Two. The Covid-19 pandemic impacted everyone, and we looked towards governments, medical professionals and research universities to help navigate us through the crisis. But the role of universities is not only to guide the response to a pandemic through medical research. The organisational response to the pandemic, decisions of senior managers, and continuing the provision of education and student support can also be vital for others to learn lessons from.

To understand the governance of the crisis response in universities further, 香港六合彩中特网 collaborated with one of its strategic partners, Tohoku University in Japan. Researchers looked at the first six months of the pandemic, from December 2019 until the end of the summer term in 2020. Although universities were generally very successful in managing the transition to online learning, campus lockdowns and health and safety issues, there was little data on the organisational decisions, actions, processes, practices and outcomes that shaped these responses. As such, this is what the team focused on in their research.

Reconstructing a crisis response

鈥淭here is an assumption that global research universities such as 香港六合彩中特网 should be able to respond quickly, efficiently and effectively to an unexpected crisis,鈥� says Tatiana, Director of the Centre for Higher Education Studies at 香港六合彩中特网. 鈥淭his was the case for 香港六合彩中特网. But you need to conduct a fine grained reconstruction of events after a crisis emerges to understand exactly how various responses shaped different outcomes.鈥� This is what the research team set out to do with this project.

Tatiana and her Faculty of Education and Society colleagues broke this down into different areas, in order to interrogate university responsiveness to Covid-19 from an organisational perspective. As well as looking at the impact different decisions had after the crisis broke, the team wanted to understand how universities could be better prepared to respond to the next global health crisis.

The team set about doing an empirical reconstruction of how the Covid-19 crisis was governed among relevant university stakeholders as the pandemic took hold. 鈥淩econstruction work that relates to crisis management is difficult,鈥� explains Tatiana. 鈥淏ecause everything happens quickly in a crisis, you tend not to remember why you did and didn鈥檛 do certain things. But we were able to reconstruct these responses in detail. We included things such as the number of meetings held, who was in the meetings, who made certain decisions and so on.鈥�

Through the course of this project, the team conducted 20 interviews with senior management team members at 香港六合彩中特网 and Tohoku University. They also undertook a comprehensive literature review on crisis management, disaster preparedness and risk assessment in higher education and related sectors. Furthermore, other universities with an interest in the project have been able to contribute their own findings, which has enabled the team to draw on a wide range of experiences for the project.

The resilience of universities

As a result of the research, the team found that the manner in which universities took learning online, managed the health and safety of staff, and contributed research to the global effort against the pandemic was excellent. 鈥淭his effort has been absolutely outstanding,鈥� Tatiana says. On the other hand, the team found that the major differences between university responses stemmed from varying access to resources, financial pressures, and national policies relating to aspects such as lockdowns and border closures.

While the team looked at a number of universities, the responses of 香港六合彩中特网 and Tohoku University both brought useful experiences to the project. 鈥溝愀哿�合彩中特网 has a core structure for responding to emergencies,鈥� Tatiana explains. 鈥淏ut it is quite decentralised otherwise, which allowed a lot of autonomy at the faculty level.鈥� This helped the university respond to the crisis quickly. On the other hand, Tohoku University is close to Fukushima, and has had to deal with a number of earthquakes in the past. This experience laid the foundations for dealing with physical crises effectively, which was useful in the response to Covid-19.

As well as helping universities fine tune their responses to crises, this project also shows how universities contribute to building more resilient societies. 鈥淯niversities have a leading role in societies,鈥� says Tatiana. 鈥淏ecause they are organised in a certain way, there really are some things universities can do better than others. We鈥檝e already seen this in cases of conflict and war, and now we鈥檝e seen it with Covid-19. This project has collated the evidence on how this can be done, which can be taken forward by more organisations to the next unfortunate crisis.鈥�

Tatiana and the team are using this project as a basis for creating a network of universities across multiple countries to continue exploring the topic. The 香港六合彩中特网 and Tohoku teams will also seek to build interdisciplinary collaboration with the disaster management departments at both universities to develop their work in an interdisciplinary way. 鈥淚鈥檓 very grateful for the 香港六合彩中特网 Global Engagement Funds,鈥� says Tatiana. 鈥淪maller funds like this are vital for getting projects off the ground.鈥�

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