What Higher Education Will Look Like in a Post COVID World
Spring 2020 presented the unfortunate, but the not unsurprising, fact that a large portion of institutions are simply not prepared for an increasingly digital learning environment. Looking towards the fall semester educators must plan for a long-overdue revolution in higher education.
University World News Africa Addition looked into Kenyan universities preparedness and found that while some public universities in Kenya can admit, teach, examine and graduate their students online, others have no form of e-learning system in place. According to Kevin Wachira and Robert Ombati,” For these universities it is now a race against time as the era of dinosaur teaching methodologies comes to a rapid end.”
No one can say for certain what reshaping the education system will look like in any part of the world, but Edward J Maloney imagines things playing out in one or more of the following 15 scenarios. Below, we’ll dive into a handful of the listed scenarios.
Back to Normal
A Late Start
Moving Fall to Spring
First-Year Intensive
Graduate Students Only
Structured Gap Year
Targeted Curriculum
Split Curriculum
A Block Plan
Modularity
Students in Residence, Learning Virtually
A Low-Residency Model
A HyFlex Model
A Modified Tutorial Model
Fully Remote
Adjusted Started Time
Altering the academic calendar could mean pushing the fall semester start date back. It could also mean beginning the semester online at the usual time and then transitioning to an on-campus setting when the pandemic has ceased. However, adjusting the timeline could result in the suspension of winter breaks as schools cram to meet the school’s curricular requirements.
Alternately, if a university chooses to move the fall semester to spring, they are ultimately closing their doors until a date where they can welcome thousands of students back safely. Moving the semester back could also bypass some of the worries faculty have about their students’ access to the necessary technology, space, and safety required for attentive online learning.
Revamped Curriculum
A Targeted Curriculum would entail fewer courses being offered than normal. Faculty would be appointed to high-demand/high-impact courses. A Split Curriculum aims to maintain as much of the full catalog as possible by distributing courses among residential and online environments.
Scaling up online curriculum would inevitably require major investments in the right technologies and approaches for educating and engaging students online.
Blocks and Modules
Another solution is breaking up how courses are traditionally taught into shorter, more flexible segments. Through using a Block Plan, students take a single course over three or four weeks. They end up taking three to five courses during the semester, the same as they normally would, but they do so consecutively (in blocks) rather than simultaneously.
A Modular Approach presents greater variation across an institution. Within a modular course model, academic departments could create courses with shorter durations and adjustable start dates, while keeping within the current semester structure.
All of these scenarios require a great deal of flexibility, creativity, and forethought. One thing for sure is that following “business as usual” will not fare well in a post-COVID reality.
For more tips on how to digitize the classroom, visit our website.