No clear alternative to universities has yet emerged, and while there’s no clear path to disrupting higher education, there are pain points which those of us in the education field and beyond could be confronting. At some point a viable alternative will likely emerge and we see six reasons that make the case for demanding something different:
https://hbr.org/2019/11/6-reasons-why-higher-education-needs-to-be-disrupted
College closures, academic program terminations and institutional mergers are nothing new on the higher education landscape. They’ve gone on for decades, particularly during tight financial times. But this year, during what looks like just the initial phases of the coronavirus pandemic, large-scale administrative restructuring in higher education is accelerating at a pace seldom, if ever, seen before.
An oft-cited statistic, for instance, reveals that as a result of factors including, but not limited to, motherhood penalties, gender discrimination, and occupational segregation, women make 79 cents for every dollar men earn. But Black women earn only 64 cents on the dollar, and for Latinas it is a dismal 54 cents. As it was in the early 20th century, women of color continue to experience occupational and economic disadvantages that reflect the ways both race and gender affect their work experiences.
Several concerning enrollment trends are holding strong as the latest, and more comprehensive, data show. Experts and advocates are particularly worried about community colleges. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center has bad news. Again. Its latest fall 2020 enrollment report continues to show downward trajectories nearly across the board in higher education. As of Sept. 24, undergraduate enrollment is now 4 percent lower than it was last fall -- a 1.5-percentage-point decrease from earlier this semester.
A series of events has converged to put new impetus behind inter-institutional sharing of courses online. The COVID-19 pandemic, rapid deployment of remote learning, growth of MOOCs and mounting financial pressure on colleges and universities have combined to open minds on this topic. It is impossible to chronicle all of the course-sharing initiatives that are springing up almost daily around the world. As the pace of such sharing of courses and degrees across colleges in this time of COVID-19 is rapidly picking up speed, so also have the range of models among otherwise fierce recruitment competitors, who also happen to be affiliated universities.
At university level, all faculties can make learning more meaningful and create practical value for their students. It is the responsibility of educators to make a lasting impact on their students. The current world needs graduates who can think critically in emotionally charged situations. We need leaders who are proactive in preventing problems from occurring and who are not sitting around waiting for crises to occur. To accomplish this, universities need to inspire and develop educators to transform the current cookie-cutter factory of education into an individualised educational model that is consistent with the student-centred learning message in their marketing.
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20200930185422174
These leaders learn to adopt a particularly open and curious mindset, and adhere to a systematic process for cracking even the most inscrutable problems. They’re terrific problem solvers under any conditions. And when conditions of uncertainty are at their peak, they’re at their brilliant best. Six mutually reinforcing approaches underly their success: (1) being ever-curious about every element of a problem; (2) being imperfectionists, with a high tolerance for ambiguity; (3) having a “dragonfly eye” view of the world, to see through multiple lenses; (4) pursuing occurrent behavior and experimenting relentlessly; (5) tapping into the collective intelligence, acknowledging that the smartest people are not in the room; and (6) practicing “show and tell” because storytelling begets action (exhibit).
Higher education enrollment is on a decade-long decline. It’s pretty much inevitable that enrollment in U.S. higher education will be down for 10 consecutive years. The latest estimates from the National Student Clearinghouse show fall ’20 enrollments down 2.5% over last year. This will further the slide for spring ’21, which will end up being a decade’s worth of dropping enrollments for degree-seeking students. All told, at the peak in spring of 2011, 19,610,826 students were enrolled in U.S. higher education. By spring of 2020, that number had eroded to 17,458,306. I predict it will dip under 17 million this spring – making it a net loss of more than two and a half million students over the last decade.
With so many classes online during the pandemic—many of them taught by professors still struggling to figure out how to teach in the format—students are increasingly turning to homework-help websites. While many students say they’re looking for the assistance they’re not getting from their colleges, professors argue that students are using these sites to cheat on quizzes and tests. Joseph Ching, a junior at Purdue University, says many of his professors have warned students not to use sites like Chegg, where students are posting homework and quiz questions and getting answers from tutors.
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-10-06-with-no-study-buddies-more-college-students-turn-to-cheating
Analysis at the Brookings Institution estimates that education gaps between rich and poor girls will take a long time to close; universal secondary education for the poorest girls in sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to be achieved by 2111. The COVID-19 pandemic is worsening this timeline. Girls’ increased burden on domestic work and unpaid care during stay-at-home orders, their increased vulnerability to gender-based violence due to limited mobility during lockdown, and their lower access to technology and the internet means girls have less time and fewer resources to engage in remote learning, are at risk of unwanted and unplanned pregnancies, and are more likely to remain out of school when they eventually reopen.
Most schools and programs wholeheartedly agree that relationships matter. But far fewer actually measure students’ social capital. Oftentimes, relationships, valuable as they may be, are treated as inputs to learning and development rather than outcomes in their own right. In turn, schools routinely leave students’ access to relationships and networks to chance. To address this gap, a host of early innovators across K–12, postsecondary, and workforce development are making important strides toward purposefully building and measuring students’ social capital in an effort to expand access to opportunity. Drawing on those emerging practices, this paper offers a framework for measuring social capital grounded in both research and practice.
According to Carol Dell’Oliver, director of the Health and Counseling Center, COVID-19 has made school more stressful for many students. “It has significantly impacted mental health, and there’s more worries and anxieties around COVID related concerns,” Dell’Oliver said. “There’s also more of a sense of isolation when they're not around their friends as much, which is an important protective factor in their mental health. There is also more unpredictability and things that are out of their personal control.”
Before COVID-19 turned the academic world upside down, community and connection happened almost spontaneously. Students could walk into a classroom and introduce themselves to the people around them and instantly feel part of their learning community. They could linger afterwards to ask a question or organize a study group. Outside of class there were endless opportunities to socialize through clubs, sports teams, and other activities. Fast forward to 2020 and, for most students, the campus experience, at least as we’ve known it, has become another casualty of the ongoing pandemic. For better or worse, the virtual classroom is now the place for students to find that all important sense of community.
https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/10/09/8-practices-to-build-an-online-learning-community/
Overall, virtual learning has made it possible to have learning experiences very similar to those we enjoyed on campus. We have achieved an almost seamless transition for attending class in-person or remotely. Our college has made tremendous efforts to mimic the benefits of on-campus learning as closely as possible while meeting all accreditation standards. They’ve adjusted schedules and given us the means to reach professors when needed, and our education is not suffering. We recognize there are challenges even with face-to-face learning. As a P4 student, I look forward to even better online education experiences as we move ahead.
https://tcop.touro.edu/news/stories/a-student-perspective-on-learning-remotely.php
McAfee's user base has been seeing an average of 375 new threats per minute during the pandemic. Once everyone got situated in their home offices and their company's security teams started taking the appropriate measures, how did the attackers adjust? Ransomware on cloud servers, hijack attempts on IoT gadgets and business email compromise (BEC) attacks increased in volume as well as sophistication over the course of Q3 2020.
Online learning is not universal. There is no global fix to conquer all of the learning curves between majors. A nursing major and a writing major cannot learn the same way. Zoom is not a comprehensive resource for everyone. The only commonality between all majors that were asked is that class and home cannot coexist. Being in class at home is emotionally draining and physically exhausting. Staying mentally active in class while having all of the distractions of home is the first challenge.
https://thewhitonline.com/2020/10/features/online-learning-perseverance-and-perspectives/
There may have never been a more critical time in our careers that we have a comfortable location to work outside of the office. The ongoing global pandemic has made it a necessity that workers from around the world work remotely, usually from home. To maintain the same efficiency and productivity at home as we would in the office, requires a more than adequate home office.
https://www.homehow.co.uk/blog/how-to-make-the-perfect-home-office
Dozens of institutions have joined consortia for exchanging online classes since the pandemic began, and new options have sprung up. Course-sharing networks historically have tended to comprise small groups of neighboring colleges with similar curricular goals, such as the Five College Consortium in Western Massachusetts and the Claremont Colleges in Los Angeles County. While the early course-sharing happened in-person, newer initiatives let students take classes online from schools all over the country. But demand for course-sharing services has soared since the pandemic began. Forced to quickly adjust to remote instruction, some colleges looked to consortia for help filling out their online program offerings.
https://www.educationdive.com/news/the-shift-online-has-colleges-looking-to-share-courses/586346/
The national student loan default rate for the 2017 fiscal year was 9.70%, which is a decrease of 0.40 percentage points from when the student loan default rate was 10.10% for the 2016 fiscal year (last year's report). Not surprisingly, for-profit institutions had the highest collective student loan default rate (14.70%), followed by public institutions (9.30%), and private institutions (6.70%).
https://lendedu.com/blog/student-loan-default-rates-by-school-state-2020/
Debate about the fairness of online learning tends to revolve around technology access. And there are indeed sharp disparities in home access to computers and reliable broadband service. But equity in online learning is more than simply making sure students have decent technology and fast internet. Every student — not just the marginalized and disenfranchised — needs sound course design, sufficient student support and testing programs that make sense and protect integrity.At this time in our history, the global pandemic presents a unique opportunity to establish and refine an online learning model that is fair and equitable for all students.
The Covid-19 pandemic has permanently changed higher education. While other sectors may rebound to pre-pandemic conditions and some may disappear forever, our nation’s colleges and universities are most certainly going to rebound to something that looks quite different from just one year ago, Forbes reports. There is upside and downside to this fact. The upside: change was needed and perhaps long overdue. The downside: it’s expensive and not everyone will be successful.
https://www.ecampusnews.com/2020/09/30/whats-on-the-horizon-for-higher-ed/
In recent weeks, colleges and universities have had to radically adapt traditional learning to keep students safe as COVID-19 shows little sign of abating. Now, students and teachers are grappling with how to avoid learning disruptions and maximize engagement in a remote world. The good news is, the online learning space is more sophisticated now. EdTech (or educational technology)platforms have not seen this much demand, pressure, and energy around online learning since the MOOC movement (massively online open courses) first exploded onto the scene in 2012. The difference is that now we have experience and data about what resonates in the online learning experience to create the most seamless and engaging education journey for students.
There may be some major shifts under way in international student mobility patterns. The current upheavals in the United States higher education landscape appear to be driving greater numbers of US students to consider full degrees abroad. US universities and colleges were on the ropes prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, with many institutions already facing shrinking enrolments, budget crunches and stagnating public funding. Add COVID-19 to the mix and the challenges only get worse for US higher education. The cracks in the system are growing into chasms and the landscape may be forever changed.
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20201002154520979
In a recent ASU+GSV session, five college presidents gave their views of what’s next for higher education. What does the future of higher education look like? A panel of five university and college presidents offered their crystal-ball visions in a recent session during the recent ASU+GSV Summit, which took place online this week. Moderator Michelle Marx, chancellor of the University of Colorado Denver, asked panelists — each representing a unique higher education model — to look forward five years and beyond.
We spoke with professors that are also experts in the design and rollout of scaled online degrees to learn more about the development of online degrees at scale and what they could mean for students.
https://www.onlineeducation.com/features/online-degrees-at-scale
In the space of just a few months, thousands of students joke that they have transferred to Zoom U -- some even opting to make it "official" with the purchase of an unofficial sweatshirt. Zoom’s videoconferencing platform has become synonymous with remote instruction during the pandemic. But Zoom was not designed specifically for educational use. ClassEDU, a start-up created by Michael Chasen, former CEO and co-founder of Blackboard, aims to change that. ClassEDU announced last week that it has raised $16 million in seed funding to develop Class for Zoom -- a Zoom add-on that will give educators new features such as the ability to take class attendance, get data insights into student participation and issue interactive quizzes during class.
All this means that students from the poorest families, without Internet access, are more likely to be denied education — widening already deep educational inequalities. Because education is strongly linked to later jobs, income and health, setbacks now will last a lifetime. In universities, the transition to online education is enabling institutions to reach out to students from underserved areas and under-represented communities. But paradoxically, if children from these communities are unable to access earlier schooling, fewer will be able to proceed to higher education. The pandemic will force a large number of institutions will remain closed, and online learning will substitute for the real thing. But if broadband and laptops are the equivalent of the teacher, the library and the laboratory, it cannot be acceptable that these are available to only a fraction of students.
Using integrated technologies in online courses to provide effective and meaningful feedback to students can leverage the unique affordances of online courses to support student success. With remote teaching being used in emergency situations, proactively knowing how to teach and learn online is more important than ever. Educators at all levels need to have a sense of empirically based pedagogy to guide them when they are called to teach online.
Instructors who teach live online classes should thoughtfully consider whether to require students to use their webcams during class. First is the issue of equity. Second, constantly being on webcam can detract from student learning.... We recommend that instructors stay on their webcams throughout the class and plan selective use of students' webcams for activities such as group discussions, role-play activities, debates, panel discussions, student presentations, and any other interactive activity that would be enhanced by seeing the students who are speaking. Even in those cases, if a student cannot be on webcam, participation via microphone or typed chat can suffice.
https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2020/9/dear-professors-dont-let-student-webcams-trick-you
As higher education slowly adapts to the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), spurred by the COVID crisis, students and industry are recognizing the need for a technologically supported way to document the full array of learning in the classroom and beyond. Soon to disappear will be the notarized paper transcripts that are controlled by the university. In the past, these 19th-century-type documents have been subject to withholding for unpaid fines and fees. The American Council on Education has recognized the need to support this move to electronic credentialing and ledger dissemination. They have announced a $900,000 Blockchain Innovation Challenge with applications due Oct. 30.
Effective leadership during times of crisis requires a dual focus on triaging immediate needs while also making strategic decisions that serve the long‐term interests of one's unit, department, or institution. As we make sense of the short‐ and long‐term effects of the pandemic, what follows are considerations for effectively navigating the present crisis while also looking ahead to collectively advance department strategic priorities.
Worldwide, lives are stressed and strained by COVID-19. Nowhere is that more evident than in the lives of students, staff and faculty members engaged in the transformed role of online learning. As higher education adapts to teaching and learning at a distance, the workload and the learning load of adopting a new delivery mode is taking a huge toll on the lives of those in higher education. This is an immense problem that is growing rapidly. While there are some students who are thriving through online learning, the toll of the virus, isolation, increased workloads and other associated effects are rising among many students, staff and faculty members. It must not be underestimated. Every institution must address these challenges that threaten the well-being of their constituents.
Last week, in one of my articles, a reader commented that online learning basically consisted of “recorded videos and a web with tutorials and examples”. For someone who has been teaching online for twenty years in addition to delivering face-to-face classes, who has had the opportunity to abundantly compare both models, and who has also seen the institution where I work reach the top of the international MBA rankings for its online programs, I simply can’t accept that we’re going to lose the greatest opportunity ever to develop this type of learning due to myths, clichés and half-truths.
https://medium.com/enrique-dans/debunking-a-few-myths-on-online-learning-a6b33116d552