Online Academics in Pakistan: COVID-19 and Beyond

COVID-19 is a menace for Pakistan’s fragile and overburdened health care system and infrastructure, insidiously permeating the socio-economic fabric. Globally complete to partial shutdown of educational institutions has been enforced, transitioning from face to face to online academics. Academic institutes are floundering to withstand the brunt. Therefore, the current study was conducted to attempt to review and highlight the impact and challenges posed by transition from conventional to online academics and how to approach them, in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic with the perspective of developing countries like Pakistan. For this purpose, search for relevant literature using search engines and websites including Google, Google Scholar and Web of Science as well as Medline database was conducted with keywords “Covid-19, academics, mental health, social impact and e-learning and combination of words”. Thirty two English language, full text articles published in the last ten years from 2010 to 2020 were selected for the literature review. With this literature review, we conclude that this lockdown has caused significant distortion in the academic world yet unequal interruption in learning with significant disruptions in internal assessments and qualification examinations with developing countries like Pakistan, compounded by a compromised educational system. However, COVID-19 is spurring the case for conversion to online academics and developing countries like Pakistan are poised to develop reliable, cost effective and secure online academic system whether it is bane or boon.