Hamdy Ahmed Abdelaziz’s research while affiliated with Tanta University and other places

The COVID-19 pandemic created a new reality for the educational sector in both formal and informal institutions. Educators in the UAE continued to offer classes and to communicate with their students virtually. Libraries, too, were able to continue to offer their educational services and provide free access to their digital environment for all ages around the public and private schools and universities. Technology has the potential to continue offering more advanced services to both universities and libraries. These services can be reimagined and introduced according to the new needs and demands after the pandemic and through business concepts. This paper explores the teachers’ and librarians’ perceptions on collaborating together within a common smart pedagogical approach, and the possibility it carries to improve the quality of their educational services. A case study was conducted in one of the library’s chain in the UAE to explore how smart technologies can promote productive collaboration between formal and informal education.

This case study conducted to investigate the impact of a responsive leadership approach in meeting customers' needs in a higher education institution in the UAE during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this purpose, a mixed-method model has been used. The data has been collected from a convenient sample working and studying at Al Qasimia University Language Center, in fall 2020. This result indicates that the provided responsive leadership support during COVID-19 was effective and helped in motivating learners and customers to keep learning and making progress greater than what was shown before COVID-19, during the face-to-face teaching and physical assessment. Although the qualitative and quantitative results in this case study revealed a significant impact of responsive leadership approach on customers’ progress, there is still a need to conduct other researches to develop and validate a responsive leadership inventory to facilitate measuring of responsive leadership attributes in a large scale sample and/or population.