….A new international study warns that without urgent reform, higher education systems will repeat the same failures when the next disruption hits
February 18, 2026
Five years on from the moment COVID-19 brought university campuses around the world to a standstill, a new research paper is asking an uncomfortable question: has higher education actually learned anything?
For a team of ten researchers spanning institutions in the United Kingdom, Bangladesh, and Nigeria, the answer is not reassuring, at least for developing higher education systems. Their study, focusing on the experiences of university lecturers in Sri Lanka during the pandemic’s emergency shift to online teaching, paints a picture of systemic unpreparedness that they argue remains largely unaddressed.
“The pandemic was a stress test,” said Chrishelle Wickramasekara, lead author and researcher at Global Banking School and Bath Spa University Partnership in Birmingham. “And what the results showed was that many higher education systems, particularly in the developing world, were not equipped. Not for that crisis, and not for the next one.”
Published in the Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Fundamentals, the paper draws on qualitative evidence gathered from Sri Lankan lecturers who lived through the chaotic early months of emergency remote teaching. What emerges is a detailed account not just of what went wrong, but of what needs to change.
Dr Kennedy Oberhiri Obohwemu, Founder and Executive Director of PENKUP Research Institute, was direct about the core finding. “Lecturers were asked to do something they had never been trained to do, with tools they had never been given, on a timeline that allowed for no preparation whatsoever. That is not an individual failure. That is a systemic one, and it is entirely preventable.”
Central to the paper’s argument is the case for investing in digital infrastructure and professional development before a crisis hits, not during it. Lecturers in the study reported scrambling to acquire basic digital competencies at the same time as they were expected to deliver fully functional online courses, an impossible dual burden that left many feeling professionally undermined.
“We cannot keep treating digital pedagogy as a niche skill for early adopters,” said Dr Chika Oguguo, also of PENKUP Research Institute. “It needs to be a core professional competency, supported by institutional investment, and built into academic development from the beginning of a lecturer’s career, not bolted on when disaster strikes.”
The study is particularly attentive to the workload crisis that unfolded alongside the pedagogical one. Far from online teaching representing a lighter load, lecturers reported that the demands of redesigning courses, troubleshooting technology, and supporting anxious students remotely created a volume of work that was, for many, unsustainable.
Oladipo Vincent Akinmade of the University of Warwick’s Digital Health and Rights Project argued that this has direct implications for how institutions plan for future disruptions. “Workload modelling in a crisis environment is not just a human resources question. It is a quality assurance question. If lecturers are stretched beyond capacity, teaching suffers, and students pay the price.”
The emotional and psychological dimensions of the crisis are also foregrounded in the research, and the authors are clear that addressing them must be part of any meaningful preparedness strategy.
Dr Festus Ituah of Regent College London said the wellbeing of academic staff deserved to be treated as a structural concern, not an afterthought. “We talk a great deal about student mental health in higher education, and rightly so. But the mental health of the people doing the teaching matters too. You cannot sustain quality education on a workforce that is burning out.”
Daniel Obande Haruna of St. Mary’s University London added that the psychological legacy of pandemic teaching had been insufficiently acknowledged. “Many lecturers are still carrying the professional and emotional scars of that period. Preparedness for future crises has to include proper recovery and support mechanisms, not an expectation that academics simply reset and move on.”
One of the paper’s most striking arguments concerns the importance of institutional trust and communication. Lecturers in the study described feeling isolated and uninformed during the crisis, receiving little meaningful guidance from their institutions about expectations, resources, or support.
“When people feel unsupported and in the dark, they do not perform at their best, and they do not recover quickly,” said Dr Ulunma Ikwuoma Mariere of Bayelsa Medical University in Nigeria. “Future crisis preparedness has to include clear, honest, and sustained communication between institutions and their academic staff.”
The paper draws heavily on the Sri Lankan context, but the authors are insistent that its lessons travel. Kaleka Nuka-Nwikpasi of the University of Chester noted that the conditions that made Sri Lankan lecturers vulnerable are present in many systems worldwide.
“Fragile digital infrastructure, under-resourced professional development, and cultures of institutional silence around staff wellbeing are not unique to Sri Lanka,” she said. “They are features of higher education systems on every continent. This research is a mirror, and a lot of universities around the world should be looking into it.”
For Sayma Akter Jannat of Jagannath University in Bangladesh, the significance of the study also lies in whose voice it amplifies. “Research on pandemic education has been dominated by institutions in the Global North. The experiences of lecturers in countries like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have been peripheral to those conversations. That has to change if the lessons we draw are going to be genuinely applicable.”
The researchers are not without hope. The paper identifies a number of practical directions for reform, including embedding digital pedagogy training into academic induction, developing institutional crisis response frameworks that explicitly address teaching continuity, and building wellbeing infrastructure that is activated proactively rather than reactively.
Dr Obioma Chidumaga Aririsukwu of St. François Medical Center in Abuja said the path forward was clear, if the will existed to follow it. “We know what lecturers needed during COVID-19 and did not have. We know what would have made a difference. The only question now is whether institutions and policymakers are prepared to act on that knowledge before the next crisis arrives, rather than after.”
The paper’s final message is sober but purposeful. Higher education has survived the pandemic. Whether it has grown from it remains, the authors suggest, very much an open question.
The study was conducted by researchers from institutions across UK, Nigeria and Bangladesh, with support from PENKUP Research Institute. It is available open access via doi.org/10.55640/jsshrf-06-02-02.
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