You are the editor-in-chief of your school's publication. The school
paper adviser requires you to write a 2-3 paragraph opinion article about the COVID-19
pandemic for a special edition paper.
Answers
Explanation:
How will the COVID-19 pandemic alter the future of teaching and learning? Answering that question requires that we first acknowledge some difficult truths.
At this point, we don't know the extent to which COVID-19 will cause some proportion of colleges and universities to close down or merge. The most vulnerable of tuition-dependent institutions, particularly the ones already facing demographically driven declines in demand, will be the hardest hit by the pandemic.
For the vast majority of colleges and universities that will survive COVID-19, most will likely see declines in revenue and increases in costs. We hope that schools prioritize their people as budgets are reduced. We learned from the 2008 recession that relying on layoffs to balanceuniversity budgets is the fastest way to kill innovation, risk taking and morale.
The higher ed future that COVID-19 will give us, however, is not entirely bleak. If we look far and hard enough into our postsecondary post-pandemic landscape, we can glimpse some reasons for optimism. Nowhere is the higher ed post-COVID-19 future as positive or as interesting as in the realm of teaching and learning.
I'll share three predictions for how our post-pandemic pedagogy will be altered across the higher ed ecosystem.The remote teaching and learning efforts that all our professors and students are now engaged in do not resemble what we think of as traditional online education. Quality online learning programs are high-input operations, requiring both time to develop and significant investments to run. Many of us are worried that the rapid shift to remote learning will tarnish the reputation of online education.
This does not mean, however, that the COVID-19-necessitated move to universal remote teaching will be all bad for student learning. The biggest future benefits of virtual instruction will come after our professors and students return to their physical classrooms.The necessity of teaching and learning with asynchronous (Canvas, Blackboard, D2L) and synchronous (Zoom) platforms will yield significant benefits when these methods are layered into face-to-face instruction. We will come back from COVID-19 with a much more widely shared understanding that digital tools are complements, not substitutes, for the intimacy and immediacy of face-to-face learning. Residential courses will be better for the practice that professors have received in moving content online, as precious classroom time will be more productively utilized for discussion, debate and guided practice.