Educational Strategies of World Top-Ranked Universities to Mitigate the Unhealthy Effect of Covid-19

Abstract

Introduction: COVID-19 pandemic has affected human life and education.. Higher education has been affected by the pandemic and came up with several measures to address the problems. This review endeavored to pinpoint the strategies of top ranked medical universities to mitigate the unhealthy effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: The top 50 medical universities based on QS World University Rankings for medicine 2020 were selected. The universities' websites were scrutinized until June 2020to collect data on education strategies. Results: The important strategies considered by top-ranked universities were distance virtual education, modifications in the curriculum and lesson planning as well as evaluation and grading. In addition, revising the policies for student ranking and graduation of students were among the important considerations of top-ranked universities. Conclusion: This review indicated that top-ranked universities have made rapid decisions to modify their education and evaluation policies during COVID-19 pandemic. By and large, though the modifications considered by these universities were represented in the websites, the detail of these changes were not mentioned. It is recommended to consider other ways of data gathering by international office of universities to achieve more details on these modifications.

Keywords

• education
• covid-19
• higher education
• pandemic