Impacts of the fourth-industrial revolution and COVID-19 pandemic on the design of educational spaces in universities. 15th Association of African Universities Annual Conference.

The world witnessed various industrial revolutions that led to the emergence of a new generation of universities. The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is characterized by speed and technologies that combine material, digital, and biological worlds. Due to the emergence of COVID-19 in late 2019, which was declared a global pandemic by the WHO in 2020, most if not all education learning services are affected. Some universities started utilizing the 4IR technologies to mitigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The educational spaces within universities are accordingly impacted. This paves the road for new educational activities and concepts to utilize some of the 4IR technologies such as Internet of Things, and Virtual and Augmented Reality. This paper identifies the expected impacts of 4IR technologies on the design of educational spaces in the 4th generation universities including the impact of COVID-19 pandemic. Comprehensive and comparative analyses are conducted to forecast the expected impacts on educational spaces based on latest literature to transform existing universities to 4G universities. Some concepts are expected to have a strong impact on transforming existing universities to 4G universities. The emergence of the COVID-19 Pandemic has affected the acceleration level of adopting some of these 4IR concepts.