**2. Shifts in higher education provision and pedagogical approaches during Covid-19**

A plethora of research conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic highlighted that the landscape of higher education has changed where the mode of delivery shifted from face-to-face learning to either remote learning or online learning or hybrid learning. In April 2020, the Covid-19 forced HEIs to revamp the mode of education delivery, and this was the case around the world. The world witnessed the sudden closure of HEIs, governments passed a variety of initiatives and regulations, and the decision-makers at the institutional level took swift measures. Ultimately, the responsibility to continue delivering the education in an unknown learning environment cascaded down to the faculty members. The role of faculty members enlarged as teaching and learning mode during Covid-19 changed.

As posited by Pandya et al. [1], five major areas of teaching and learning were modified on an emergency basis to continue providing education—course content, the teaching methods, assessments, the faculty's preparedness and support from educational-technologies support teams. The researchers found that during Covid-19, the frequency of conducting online teaching increased, while other collaborative activities such as group discussions, games, in-class presentations, and quizzes decreased. Also, online breakout rooms, discussion boards, students' real-time feedback, and streamed events took over the learning activities. It was also noted that the delivery approach moved from faculty-led teaching to content-led teaching. The researchers noted that despite this shift, the content did not change significantly because the time to make the content compatible with remote teaching was inadequate. Furthermore, during the shift, many HEIs were already in the middle of their academic term and

#### *Disparity in Higher Education Provision Caused by Technological Capabilities of Nations… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101627*

changing the content was not pragmatic. Initially, while the content did not change extensively, a significant difference was noted as HEIs reduced the frequency in conducting written and oral exams, practical exams and project work. Since Covid-19 enforced such rapid changes, faculty members underwent several professional development sessions to develop their capabilities to utilize educational technologies and deliver remote sessions. For all of these amendments, support from the technical experts was highly important. Technical support here includes responsiveness to queries and requests from the faculty, providing training sessions to the faculty regarding various educational technologies, and providing relevant technologies.

The above discussion indicates that there was an expansion in the faculty's job during Covid-19 in the form of revisions in course content, assessment strategies, assessment instruments and administrations, and delivery frameworks. To deliver the sessions remotely, the faculty had to adopt relevant educational technologies, which implied exerting additional physical and/or psychological efforts. Schaufeli et al. [2] considered this as 'job demands' that required additional resources for the faculty to not experience stress and burnout. Here, it becomes important to understand the job demand-resource model in the context of higher education provision during Covid-19.

The job demands-resources model assumes that every job is associated with factors that can be categorized as job demands and job resources [2]. Job demands are those physical, social, organizational, and psychological aspects that require cognitive and emotional efforts or skills, which incur psychological costs or physiological costs. The job resources are vital to performing the job, achieving the goals, reducing costs, developing employees, and preventing stress and burnout among employees. There is extensive literature available on the job demand-resources model because of its application to any kind of occupation. During Covid-19, the nature of the faculty's job changed and created new requirements for resources to perform the job. These changes and their influence on the provision of higher education is discussed in the next section.
