Globalized blended education: securing synergies among far flung universities

The Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has forced the education stakeholders to adopt online education as a substitute for face to face education despite the varied perceptions about effectiveness of online courses. The goal of this commentary is to leverage collaborations between universities to complement online learning offered by the parent university (university where student is registered for a degree) with the face to face learning offered by the collaborative university (university with low spatial proximity to the student's home where he or she enrolls as exchange student). This helps the student to enhance the value of education in a blended mode (i.e., a mix of online and face to face learning) thereby reducing the psychological distance from online education. The collaboration has several implementation issues, but they could be overcome through active government support at an international level and the establishment of common academic frameworks to assist greater understanding between universities globally, improved flexibility of decision-making at university level and joint recognition of online learning. Long-term collaborations as a "new-normal" practice will be beneficial to transform the educational world into truly virtual single entities. Creating synergies between the competitors would have been a load sharing and responsibility sharing in response to the challenges posed by the virus.