Campus continuity: what unis can do to help their students

As the emergency subsides but normality fails to return, higher education institutions need to do more.

Universities are focused on ensuring academic continuity for students

The impact of COVID-19 on education systems around the world is unlike anything we have seen in the post-war era. More than 1.6 billion students have been affected, representing more than 91 per cent of all students in the world. Demand for online learning has skyrocketed. In April, there were 10.3 million enrolments in courses on Coursera, up 644 per cent from the same period last year.

Universities are (rightly) focused on ensuring academic continuity for students, and in many cases that has meant relying on existing, ready-made, online courseware from other institutions. Colleges can reference the vast set of remote teaching resources that leading universities have made available under Creative Commons, for example. As the emergency subsides but normality fails to return, higher education institutions need to do more. There’s a likelihood that virtual learning will need to be a part of education for the foreseeable future.

Evolution in the higher education ecosystem happens through “punctuated equilibrium”: long periods of relatively slow change interspersed with occasional moments of rapid adaptation. The pandemic is a punctuation moment. Educators, faced with unprecedented urgency, are working hard to restore teaching and learning using technology, innovation and collaboration.

Universities want — and need — to be providing their own online content from their own faculty. But many faculty members have never designed or delivered a course online. Universities have to work with faculty to make quick decisions: which courses must be reimagined online and which content can be transferred directly without a significant loss of experience? Faculty will need to reimagine seminars, making improvements to how they teach online. For example, a two-hour lecture may consist of multiple activities rather than a continuous, monolithic video. Finally, as universities begin to transition to a more robust digital infrastructure during this period, virtualisation, guided projects and gamification will take online learning solutions beyond videoconferencing. As universities develop their own digital competencies, what started as a short-term response to a crisis could well become an enduring digital transformation of higher education.

Universities are in varying stages of digital transformation. We’ve developed the following framework to help universities identify where digital learning fits into their education ecosystem and, with that knowledge, transform their teaching and learning in response to COVID-19. The guide draws on our collective experiences leading digital strategy at the University of Michigan, Imperial College London, Duke University and Coursera.

Digital newcomers are institutions that lack the necessary prerequisites of online learning and remote teaching. These institutions are characterised by having less than 3 per cent of their courses available online, no experience in teaching online and not having allocated any team or budget to exploring or expanding online content. But it’s not all about teachers and administration. In these schools, students and faculty have no or limited access to software (videoconferencing, collaboration tools) and hardware (laptops, webcams). They have poor or no internet connectivity. They may have mobile and Wi-Fi connectivity but are inhibited by expensive data costs.

Early adopters

The current state of technology and platform choices make it easier for universities in this position to take quick actions. We now have extensive broadband access, reliable communications tools, user-friendly videoconferencing and widespread smartphone adoption.

Emerging adopters are universities that have successfully experimented with online learning in pockets. They already have basic communication and collaboration tools in place, with a few departments delivering programs online. Faculty and instructors have experienced the benefit and have the conviction to embrace the medium. These institutions now need to accelerate their digital transformation with institutional intent and an online-strategy task force. They should use early adopters among departments, faculty and staff as mentors and key architects of their strategy. That means empowering them with authority, resources and decision-making latitude to adopt turnkey solutions. They will also need to accelerate the production of online courses, supplemented wherever required with widely available open content from other institutions. They can minimise human curation by using machine-learning solutions such as CourseMatch to map the most relevant courses to their curriculum. Universities can begin to explore virtual and take-home labs for courses that require hands-on problem solving, given the uncertainty around access to physical labs in the months ahead. Finally, they will need to upgrade software and hardware infrastructure rapidly for on and off-campus learning, including alternative plans for students who don’t have reliable connectivity.

Advanced institutions are those with robust technical infrastructure, a large catalogue of digital content and a faculty well versed in teaching online. They usually have dedicated centres of academic innovation driving their digital strategy. For such institutions, this moment is about scaling the infrastructure across all programs. That said, advanced institutions should accelerate innovations to serve online communities with varying socio-economic backgrounds and increase commitment to creating an inclusive environment by championing breakout group discussions, live discussion boards and student presentations. Offline, community engagement can be strengthened through crowdsourced notes, study groups, virtual coffee hours and live-streamed events.

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James DeVaney works at the University of Michigan; Gideon Shimshon works at Imperial College London; Matthew Rascoff works at Duke University; Jeff Maggioncalda is chief executive of Coursera.

Copyright Harvard Business Review 2020/Distributed by New York Times Syndicate