Social distancing is here to stay for much more than a few weeks. It will upend our way of life, in some ways forever. We all want things to go back to normal quickly. But what most of us have probably not yet realized—yet will soon—is that things won’t go back to normal after a few weeks, or even a few months. Some things never will. What counts as “social distancing”? The researchers define it as “All households reduce contact outside household, school or workplace by 75%.” That doesn’t mean you get to go out with your friends once a week instead of four times. It means everyone does everything they can to minimize social contact, and overall, the number of contacts falls by 75%.
At first glance, the overall responses of 746 campus chief executives to Inside Higher Ed’s new Survey of College and University Presidents may seem discordantly upbeat, particularly on financial questions. Presidents, whose responses were solicited in January, before the onset of the coronavirus became apparent, seem solidly confident in the financial stability of their campuses, with a record-high 69 percent of all college leaders agreeing that their institution will be financially stable over five years, up from 66 percent last year, and 57 percent saying the same over a 10-year period, the same as in 2019.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard last month described in the scholarly journal Cell how they used a deep learning neural network to identify a molecular compound that’s different from most antibiotics. They showed that when the compound is injected in mice, it fights bacteria that no existing drug can eliminate. The discovery even has implications for fighting the coronavirus that is causing the Covid-19 disease.
So today this column will focus on a question that is generating a good bit of discussion among thoughtful observers of teaching and learning issues: What impact will this sudden, forced immersion and experimentation with technology-enabled forms of learning have on the status of online learning in higher education? Below, 11 experts share their thoughts on how the explosion of remote learning — much of which may be primitive and of dubious quality — could affect attitudes and impressions of a mode of learning that already struggles to gain widespread faculty and student support.
Adaptive assessments are becoming a valuable tool for educators who see the critical need for personalization in the classroom. With adaptive assessments, a teacher can test student knowledge and skill sets by adjusting questions based on student responses. To do this, more and more virtual platforms are being created and employed by institutions across the United States. Implementing adaptive assessments effectively and efficiently, however, is key to student, teacher, and institutional success. Below are three best practices for carrying out adaptive assessments.
The spread of the coronavirus in the United States is rattling adjunct instructors. Few receive health insurance through the colleges and universities where they work, and fewer still have paid sick leave. Even adjuncts with access to paid time off say there are barriers that impede their ability to take advantage of the benefit.
D. Christopher Brooks and Susan Grajek, EDUCAUSE Review
One response to the COVID-19 virus is to immediately shift all courses to fully online environments, but many faculty are not prepared to teach online. Colleges and universities undertaking such a momentous shift will need to provide significant and ongoing support to faculty and instructors.
Jon Marcus, Hechinger Report
Even before the crisis, endowment returns and payouts had been comparatively low. “A lot of endowments are going to suffer big losses from this,” said Charlie Eaton, a sociologist at the University of California, Merced, who studies the financialization of higher education. Making matters worse, the massive setback comes on top of existing financial challenges resulting from an unprecedented enrollment decline, leaving many universities poorly positioned to cope. “Most schools are running with very little cushion, especially regional privates,” said Kaitlyn Maloney, senior director of research at the education consulting firm EAB.
The country has already seen a downturn in new international enrollments in the last several years. The number of new international students fell around 10% between its peak in the fall of 2015 and the fall of 2018, according to data gathered by the Institute of International Education (IIE). The drop-off is in part due to inhospitable immigration policies and hostile rhetoric from the Trump administration, explains a recent report from NAFSA: Association of International Educators. Yet colleges have historically relied heavily on this sector for tuition revenue to help balance budgets left gaping by decreases in state funding. Of particular importance have been students from China, who account for about one-third of all international students in the U.S.
The federal government opened the door for regional accreditors to operate in other parts of the country, and one agency is taking advantage, Judith Eaton writes. Is this a good idea or a bad one? Department officials said their goal was to open up the institutional accreditation system to competition. The agency’s firecracker was, at first glance, a small one. The regional accreditors are not forced to operate nationally. They don’t even have to consider institutions out of their regions that seek accreditation, even if institutions make such requests. But, in the last few weeks, the firecracker went off. One regional accreditor, the WASC Senior College and University Commission, has taken first, albeit modest, steps to operate nationally.
That night he created a similar Google spreadsheet for UT Austin students to post the things they need or things they could help with. Students at over a dozen universities have started similar spreadsheets, Facebook groups and resource documents. As more campuses close across the county, these resources continue to grow. At the University of Virginia, the Student Council has led the effort. The council is currently matching donors to those in need and has raised over $10,000 in less than five days, said Isabella Liu, chair of the representative body.
Student retention remains a major challenge for American colleges and universities. Although first-to-second year college persistence of entering students has increased slightly over the last decade, results from the National Student Clearinghouse, indicate that among first-time students entering college in fall 2017, 73.8% continued their education at some U.S. institution in fall 2018 (persistence) while only 61.7% continued at the same college they entered (retention). But some institutions are now taking a different tack and are using technology to communicate with students in order to learn about personal issues that might be causing them to consider dropping out.
“Online learning can be done well, and SUNY has a long history of online learning,” said Empire State College Provost Meg Benke. Most of Empire State’s students do at least some of their coursework online. For faculty making the switch to online teaching, Benke said, the most important thing is to replicate the sense of community that naturally occurs in a physical classroom. “You have to make sure there’s an interactive component for students,” she said. “In an online-only environment, we find that having live sessions and higher interaction promotes greater student success.”
Johns Hopkins instructors have been asked to move courses online in response to the outbreak of coronavirus. We spoke to experts in remote instruction for tips and advice. In response to the ongoing outbreak of coronavirus, Johns Hopkins has suspended all in-person courses while faculty and staff plan for remote instruction. Courses will resume remotely as early as next week for graduate students and on March 23 for undergraduate students. These policies will remain in effect until at least April 12.
Learning personalized to every student seems a nearly impossible task. However, with the ever-increasing use in schools of online learning management systems and customizable tools, reaching individual learners is becoming more and more feasible. With that said, the use of online platforms to teach is not in and of itself a new idea; it is instead how students are being reached through these technological innovations that is the real trend. Specifically, two areas on the technology front that are gaining more traction are adaptive learning and augmented intelligence.
If your school is operating virtually as a result of COVID-19, you may be wondering how to continue teaching students who don’t have access to the internet at home, or who only have low-bandwidth access. Fortunately, there are many ways to keep Chromebooks and G Suite up and running even when online access is slow or unavailable. We’ve pulled together ideas for educators and school IT teams who want to encourage all students to keep learning, regardless of their online access.
Sam Benezra, The University Network
As universities around the world move classes online due to the spread of COVID-19, edX, a popular platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs), has announced a new initiative to assist in the transition to online courses. The initiative, dubbed the Remote Access Program, will allow students from participating universities to freely access courses offered by the university they attend as well as those offered by any other institutions participating in the program. The aim is to allow students to access educational resources while their universities are closed.
Colin Wood, EDSCOOP
The online education company Coursera announced on Thursday that any university in the world closing its doors in response to the new coronavirus can receive free access to most of its online courses. A new page on Coursera’s website encourages users to “take student learning online in response to coronavirus.” Each institution can provide access for up to 5,000 enrolled students to the website’s catalog of 3,800 courses across 400 subjects.
Advice for faculty members who have to quickly transition their courses to an online or remote instructional format from UIS Associate Vice Chancellor for Online Learning, Ray Schroeder responds based on 25 years in the field and having played an instrumental role in the 2005 Sloan Semester Katrina initiative.
Heeding health experts’ advice, institutions are taking instruction remote and some are vacating residence halls. The tactic university officials are using is called social distancing. It has somewhat of a buzzword as the new coronavirus, and the respiratory illness it causes, COVID-19, has taken hold in six of the world’s seven continents. Social distancing refers to the practice of staying away from large gatherings and crowded areas, such as shopping centers and stadiums. In a university setting, it could apply to classrooms and residence halls, in which students study and live in close quarters.
While telecommuting has become more mainstream in recent years—the remote workforce grew 159% between 2005 and 2017—when just 3.4% of Americans work from home at least half of the time, it’s not unreasonable to think that many of the employees who have been asked to work from home due to the coronavirus may have little to no experience doing so, or at least not for an extended period of time.
