The Impact of the Prevalence of Covid-19 on the Management Dimensions of Universities and Iran's Higher Education institute from the Perspective of Experts

The global Covid 19 pandemic has caused the dynamic emergence of the "corona crisis" at different educational, cultural, social, political, security, economic, legal and professional dimensions thereby leading to a novel experience in managing the social interactions and human security. In this respect, the Higher Educational system is not an exception; in the past few months, the higher educational systems in the world have changed drastically due to the Coronovirus pandemic. For this reason, the need felt to investigate the possible impact of the new situation on the educational system. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of coronavirus outbreak on the different dimensions of university managements from the perspective of academic experts.

The present study was conducted in 1399 using a qualitative approach. Participants in this study were 18 experts and administrators at different universities in Tehran (including dean, dean, vice chancellor and department manager) who had management experiences. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and content analysis (thematic); method was used to analyze the interviews (coding and determining the main and secondary themes).

From the analysis of the interviews, four main themes of educational dimensions and activities, research dimensions and activities, social services and and governance and university management and 18 sub-themes were extracted and finally the results were summarized.

The findings of this study indicated that the outbreak of Covid-19 have affected different aspects of internationalization, globalization, localization, digital transformation, inequality in access to higher education, educational quality, the prevalence of virtual research, science and technology parks , research quality, research budget, university-industry relationship, local community networking, social accountability, management and leadership, upstream laws and documents, human resource management, financial resource management, crisis management and change management at universities.