The world is currently battling the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) that has been declared as a global pandemic since mid-March 2020. The pandemic has inevitably impacted social and economic activities of the nation, including those in the education sector. As the governments have mandated universities to close their campuses, learning activities has been forced to move online. In this difficult situation, many university administrators, lecturers, as well as students may find it difficult to adapt to the so-called “new normal” ways of learning.   Hence, as this is an unprecedented situation, this study explores the challenges faced by universities as academic institutions, lecturers, and students. This study starts by conducting a literature review concerning the challenges in e-learning in context of a pandemic. Data collected are then analyzed qualitatively using inductive thematic analysis technique, resulting in a taxonomy of e-learning challenges during a pandemic. Our analysis shows that students are challenged by connectivity, e-learning system support, and technological and self-regulation issues. On the other hand, lecturers are being challenged by competency, operational, self-regulation, and isolation issues. Meanwhile, institutions identify financial support and change management as challenging issues. This study highlights the need for further investigation to address the aforementioned challenges in e-learning.

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Recently, education has been enlivened by the presence of the Merdeka Campus program initiated by Nadiem Makarim. It uses the Kampus Merdeka concept to learn to follow the development of education in the 4.0 era. This change has become a paradigm for Higher Education to build a Merdeka Campus to learn to face challenges in the 4.0 era. However, the challenge is not easy for universities, so that students join the independent program to learn quickly. This study aims to motivate students to participate in independent learning activities in a collaborative learning system with gamification techniques. Gamification is in the form of reward badges for student achievement in all learning activities carried out. The higher education independent learning system is designed using the library study method and Agile Development with two frameworks, namely Laravel and VueJS. It can be proven from the results of the SUS Score Analysis showing the number 92.5 indicating that the independent learning campus system provides positive benefits by gamification of students being more motivated and ready to face learning challenges in the 4.0 era.

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The pandemic caused by Covid 19 has kicked off survival strategies from vulnerable groups of people to small businesses, which has challenged the core operating practices and modified consumption patterns. Thus, effective marketing strategies are imperative in these times, that not only convey values of the brand but also resonate with people.  Market disruptions are most likely to impact millennials and Gen Z and given the exploration and spending propensity, millennials are most likely to drive demand during the pandemic as well as in the post pandemic world. This research proposal aims to explore how consumer habits have changed during pandemic, how likely these habits will stick in the post pandemic world and how advertising needs to be transformed which relates best with millennials. The methodology involves a detailed analysis of literature and gathering insights from social media sites through big data.  This research investigates the impact of avoiding deterministic automatisms purchasing processes, implying the need to understand, from an academic and conceptual standpoint, the utility of the set of business strategies to truly influence consumer purchasing behaviour of Millennials.