No one wants to be the first one to say it, so I will. Regular academic workloads are going to have to be re-arranged for the Summer and Fall Terms. In most cases drastically. This is simple math. Providing quality teaching in the fall is going to require – in part – significantly smaller classes. This will not only be true if the fall is fully online. It will also be true if – as the currently fashionable musing has
So, last week I suggested that the Fall term was likely both to start and finish online because of practical difficulties in pivoting halfway though in most institutions. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is that most pivot scenarios assume that students who will start off learning at home are able to drop everything and find local accommodations with very short notice, and not all students are in a position to do that. This would leave institutions either
Let’s talk about the future of online learning. Short term, we have the following problems: 1) The Fall term is going to be online. 2) Most institutions are not good at online. 3) The effort to go online is immense. 4) The cost of not going online is immense. 5) Institutions are already facing a $ crisis. So, given this, who pays the cost? This is a really good question, and one that does not have a simple answer, mainly because
Most people want to know how the heck we get out of this mess. Not dates, necessarily, but the process. We have to see big declines in the number of new cases before we can start to unwind the physical-distancing measures are now in place. How few cases do we have to see before the maximum gathering moves from five people (where it currently is in Ontario, YMMV), to ten? To fifty? A hundred? When can we stop having to
Today, I want to issue a challenge to all Canadian universities. I think a lot of universities are going to be in significant trouble come September. I know everyone is working hard to avoid this outcome but fixing what needs to be fixed for September is simply too big a job for individual institutions. And so, I am going to argue that the only way forward is for institutions is to do something which does not come naturally to them,
One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.
