B. Write a conclusion based on your research about which platform you find safe and learner savvy for the online sessions.
Answers
Explanation:
When Times Higher Education surveyed leaders of prominent global universities in 2018, the 200 respondents – from 45 countries across six continents – were emphatic on one point: online higher education would never match the real thing.
Although 63 per cent expected established, prestigious universities to be offering full degrees online by 2030, only 24 per cent thought that the electronic versions would be more popular than traditional campus-based degrees (“How will technology reshape the university by 2030”, Features, 27 September 2018).
Lino Guzzella, president of ETH Zurich, asserted that “meeting people, interacting with peers, students and supervisors – in short, a real university environment – is the key to deep understanding”.
An Australian vice-chancellor said that “face-to-face interaction will never be matched in quality by other modes of communication” – even if current “fads temporarily appear to be tilting the balance towards non-human interaction”.
answer: When Times Higher Education surveyed leaders of prominent global universities in 2018, the 200 respondents – from 45 countries across six continents – were emphatic on one point: online higher education would never match the real thing.
Although 63 per cent expected established, prestigious universities to be offering full degrees online by 2030, only 24 per cent thought that the electronic versions would be more popular than traditional campus-based degrees (“How will technology reshape the university by 2030”, Features, 27 September 2018).
Lino Guzzella, president of ETH Zurich, asserted that “meeting people, interacting with peers, students and supervisors – in short, a real university environment – is the key to deep understanding”.
An Australian vice-chancellor said that “face-to-face interaction will never be matched in quality by other modes of communication” – even if current “fads temporarily appear to be tilting the balance towards non-human interaction”.
Jane Gatewood, vice-provost for global engagement at the University of Rochester in New York state, likened the difference between residential and online learning to the difference between visiting a new place and merely “watching a video” of it.
And Yang Hai Wen, vice-president of Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, said that online education would “create more unhealthy graduates and [create] more frustrations in interpersonal communication”.
Chinese social media is currently filled with anecdotes of such frustrations with online education. Students recount having to rush out of toilets to answer professors’ calls or turn off their video feeds to block out relatives yelling or playing mah-jong in the background. One group of students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong all changed their usernames to “NO SOUND” after a hapless professor continued to lecture with his microphone turned off.
Then again, such teething problems are only to be expected given the breakneck speed at which universities in China have been forced to move all of their teaching online – precisely to preserve the health of their students – in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak that has paralysed the region. The world’s largest higher education system has been thrust into an e-learning experiment of unprecedented scale and scope, as university medical staff scramble to address an epidemic that, by early March, had infected in excess of 100,000 patients and killed about 4,000.
All students in mainland China and Hong Kong – from kindergarteners to doctoral candidates – were asked to stay home and pursue their education online after the Lunar New Year break ended in late January. At the tertiary level, this affects 30 million learners at 3,000 institutions, many of which have responded by rushing to develop and launch mandatory online classes to fill a void that may endure for the rest of the academic year in the most severely affected areas.
Nor is it only Chinese students that are affected. Many of the half-million international students enrolled at universities in mainland China and Hong Kong have had to log in from their home countries to continue their courses. Meanwhile, Australia is also seeking online solutions for the estimated 100,000 Chinese international students who went home for the Lunar New Year and were then prevented by Australia’s China travel ban from returning to campus. The issue is particularly fraught in Australia given that the 2020-21 academic year has already begun but, if the epidemic endures, the same issue could affect other nations with large Chinese cohorts, such as the UK and Canada.
Universities in other Covid-19 hotspots, such as Italy, Iran and Singapore, have also closed their campuses, and Singapore has replaced in-person teaching with online alternatives for the time being.
But how realistic is it to suddenly shift large amounts of teaching online? Are the university leaders surveyed by THE right to assume that students will see the virtual student experience as a poor substitute for the real thing? Or might it be that online higher education becomes the new normal far earlier and to a far greater extent than any experts were previously predicting?