Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for a newer and richer experience." COVID-19 has proved the intermittency and transiency of social life, and what was deemed as the “norm” has been dramatically interrupted since the emergence of the pandemic.

The public health crisis has forced education systems to adopt digitized approaches to teaching and learning. The new approaches to digital education system have amplified a multitude of challenges and inequities in the current educational systems that could not have been recognized in the context of face-to-f-ace modes (Daniel, 2020). As the adoption of online teaching and learning has now become ubiquitous, the need for data literacy has become more apparent, in which has wrought social phenomena such as digital citizenship and democracy in learning. At the height of the pandemic, these changes necessitated educators to question if the abrupt move to online platforms means students are more exposed to varied sources of information online. Partaking on the account of both democracy and literacy would lead to both inquiry and informed action (Stitzlein, 2020). Thus, it emphasizes educational institutions' role in shaping the students to navigate a civically engaged and digitally literate learning by considering the ethical implications.

Educators have a notable role to play in the development of citizenship (Willemse et al., 2015). Digital citizenship flourishes from the development of critical digital literacy through participation and engagement. Digital literacy aids digital citizens to evaluate information from online sources (Copenhaver, 2018), simultanesouly observe the digital rights of others (Pangrazio & Sefton-Green, 2021), to inaugurate equal opportunities to participate in the learning processes. Responsible citizenship is developed through the community, democracy, and schooling (Kim & Choi, 2018). Democracy has been viewed as a shared set of values by citizens who are socially responsible. Democracy and good citizenship are complex social phenomena that cannot be taught directly (Buchholz et al., 2020). With an influx of digital tools, there emerge new challenges and opportunities for educators to nurture digital democracy and citizenship (Simsek & Simsek, 2013). Mapping and deploying digital literacies through digital classrooms to fashion digital citizenship among students, equipped with the technical aptitude towards predisposed complex ideas on digital identities and narratives, to promote acceptable social change and equity collectively. At this juncture, grasping the relationship between digital citizenship and digital literacy can nurture responsible citizens during a crisis, and most importantly, democratizing learning and significantly shifting the power and control to students to move beyond digital competency. To extend this trajectory, assimilating an appreciation towards democratic learning to the digital setting disputes the preceding concepts of online learning. As the students embrace an active role of becoming part of the digital community, and share collective values and identity as digital citizens, the adoption of digital learning has to be pursued by the stakeholders from the perspectives of promoting distributed responsibilities, refining knowledge through challenging feedback that triggers critical cognitive dissonance in which the power structure is directed towards a collaborative approach to decrease transactional distance.

The future remains unpredictable, which also presents a possibility of more crises. The COVID-19 pandemic has presented opportunities for us to reflect and contemplate on the fabric of education. Solving future crises will require sacrifice and collective action from individuals and institutions. The development of literacies should be at the best of meeting the demands of the unpredictable future, grounded on the collective learnt praxis through policy innovations, and as Anne Frank said, "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

Associate Professor Dr Malissa Maria Mahmud
School of Interdisciplinary Studies
Email: @email