Manuscript received April 20, 2022; revised June 27, 2022; accepted July 13, 2022.
Abstract—The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has
caused a major health crisis and quarantined half of the
planetary population, and as a result, it has caused a
momentary rupture or even, in the invisibility of the magnitude
of this virus total suspension of higher education. It is in this
perspective that the treatment of a subject related to this
Pandemic is, for us, very important, and especially to study its
impact on higher education. Moreover, especially that there is
little or no research that has addressed this issue in the case of
Tunisia. The objective of this contribution is to report on
research that we conducted at the Higher Institute of
Technology Studies of Kairouan in Tunisia (HITS of Kairouan),
with the aim of studying the experience feedback from the
practice of Distance Education, through the Virtual University
of Tunis (UVT) platform, in the COVID-19 confinement period
(for the years 2020 and 2021). In this context, we will divide our
research into three parts. The first will be reserved for the
presentation of the general and current context of the
COVID-19 phenomenon. Next, we will explain the extent and
impact of this virus on higher education around the world.
Finally, a third empirical part will be devoted to the
presentation of our research, while demonstrating the impact of
COVID-19 on teaching within the HITS of Kairouan, and also
the opportunities and constraints of the use of distance
education.
Index Terms—COVID-19, higher education, distance
education, UVT-platform
Sahbi Dkhili is with Higher Institute of Technological Studies of
Kairouan, Tunisia. E-mail: dkhilisahbi@yahoo.fr (S.D.)
Cite: Sahbi Dkhili, "Higher Education in the COVID-19 Era: Challenges and Opportunities of Using of Distance Education," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 975-982, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).