Abstract:

Through the abyss of the COVID-19 pandemic nightmare, all types of losses, planning and management failures, and many situational factors faced during everyone’s experiences and tragedies. While many organizations, industries, and various sectors, especially in the academic hallways, were touched by the pandemic, the momentum in which educators were able to immobilize their efforts and maintain a “new norm” to create a different level of learning demonstrated to every country that educators were united in one mission – education for all. Thus, the “fighting spirit” of educators, administrators, parents, and students helped to keep the educational momentum alive despite the enormous number of barriers experienced in so many situations. This “painful epoch of time” marked a steppingstone for many generational stakeholders involved, as well as serving as a testing measure to see if each country’s educational structure could sustain such learning barriers, but yet maintain a certain level of educational standards, achievements, as well as memorializing these efforts in a new form of knowledge management for later reflections and use for any future crises. This memorialization of such efforts will help to outline the format of this new piece of educational literature during the new period of global history known by many now as “The New Norm.” Prepared or not, the world was hit with factors, issues, and challenges that not only tested each member of society to their ability to react to disaster, but also to measure their successes and failures in such a range of trials/situations. While reporters, web bloggers, social media correspondents and various traditional news media outlets reported the news either in real time or with the limited or “tampered” medical numbers, the main question was why did this happy and not portray a true picture for the world? Nonetheless, educators realized early on that they could not rely only on science or numbers, but their mission was explicit to assemble all educational stakeholders and create a new norm of learning. In particular, the paper represents a work in progress to open a new genre of literature in several areas. First, a focus on what happened after the main impact of changes in work, school, and industry when the pandemic went into a full impact force. Second, another perspective to share on the ways lessons learned were used to help strategize and create best practices, policies, and procedures so all industries and organizations could deal with “The New Norm”. Finally, this opens a new epoch of global reinventing of viewing a new lens of the “meaning of work” in light of the “Great Resignation” experienced by many organizations and individuals. While it was documented that in the United States alone, more than one million people have died as a result of the negligence inflected upon the public due to the lack of focus by the previous Administration, as well as more than 14.8 million people have resigned from their jobs to focus on a new meaning of work to obtain a better quality of living after experiencing this challenging period in time, there was still a human instinct to strive towards restoring order in an age of chaos and pandemonium. Consequently, this paper will help to view how educators approach this new norm of educational set up, implementation, and evaluation, as well as understand the next steps for their mission.

Keywords:

New Educational Norm, Knowledge Management, Great Resignation.