We’re only a few weeks into the term, but there are two important phenomena going on that, in a sensible world, would be the subject of urgent inquiry by all Canadian institutions.

(This is not, of course, a sensible world, but I’ll get back to that at the end of the blog).

The first topic is: why exactly have so many international students enrolled for remote teaching this term?  We don’t have full numbers yet, and probably won’t for awhile, but from everything I can gather, while international student numbers are down, they aren’t down as far as feared in the Spring.  Some high-prestige institutions appear to have kept their numbers close to steady and a few may even have increased their numbers.  Among lower-prestige institutions, numbers do seem to be down, but among people I have spoken to at those institutions, the losses seem to be at most in the 10-20% range, not the 40% or more feared a few months ago.

This is good.  It means the financial hit from COVID will not be as big as initially feared.  But at the same time, it’s an enormously disorienting result because it undermines pretty much everything we believed about international students until just a few weeks ago.  Maybe – just maybe – international students do attend for the education and not the “Canada experience” and the shot at a job afterwards.  And if that’s true, then there are almost uncounted new expansion opportunities for Canadian institutions.  Maybe we can sell remote learning opportunities, and undercut our American and UK competition (neither of whom have devoted nearly as much time and effort to remote teaching over the last month because….well, hubris, really).  Maybe we can massively expand markets by saying “learn at home from the best remote teachers” and save these students a bundle by not requiring them to come to Canada.

You’re rolling your eyes.  I can see you.  And yes, I am being half-facetious here.  Maybe they signed up because they expected to make it to Canada by January.  Or if not January then by next summer.  Maybe if this COVID nonsense is still with us in 12 months, we will see those anticipated fall-offs.  Or maybe we won’t depending on how work-permit arrangements pan out.

The point is, we don’t know the answer to any of these questions.  And yet BILLIONS of dollars hang on the answers.  How on God’s green earth is this not the only question on people’s minds right now?

The topic has more to do with domestic students.  I have been doing a lot of talks at schools lately (virtually, of course) and one subject that keeps coming up is that a lot of people are finding that a higher-than-expected number of students are actually very happy with remote teaching.  For some of them, it’s the asynchronous aspect appeals, as it means they have more freedom to adjust their learning schedule to accommodate their work schedule.  For others, they prefer synchronous but on-screen to synchronous live.  The pop-psych theory that usually gets thrown about is that this new format is better for introverts while the traditional format works better for extroverts.

Colour me skeptical about a simplistic link like this, but I am hearing enough stories like this that there is something going on here, and that while most students might be eager to get back to campus, there may be a substantial chunk who are indifferent and may be better-served with an online approach.  Substantial enough that there may be room for one or more players in the market to really aggressively expand in this direction (it probably would make equal sense for a new entrant to go heavy in this area but there are all sorts of regulatory barriers, so in practice it’s easier for an existing institution).

Again though: we don’t really know the answer to this question because, as far as I know, no one is asking the questions.  It would be worth knowing the degree to which students hate/love the new system and the degree to which they’d prefer to return to the old delivery system.   And not just according to basic demographic categories like age, gender, etc.  Run some Big Five personality tests, or introversion/extroversion tests.  Ask about depth of family and work commitments. See if there are deeper factors at work. If the answer really is that people favour asynchronous over synchronous learning, we’ll need to be vigilant that this isn’t just because it is seen as less rigorous.

Again, there are literally billions of dollars at stake on the answers, but no one to my knowledge is working on it.  And, as with the questions on international students, this is an opportunity that will pass quickly.  If we unthinkingly go back to the old ways, we may be missing out on some big opportunities to expand markets and access.

(Note: I am not abandoning my long-term position that the pre-March system was the right system for most students most of the time.  But the minority doesn’t have to be enormous for financially viable new programs and systems to emerge, particularly when all the normal costs of building up remote teaching programs and learning new pedagogies have been taken care of due to the force majeure of COVID-19).

You now might be asking why institutions are not putting money into this kind of vital research.  The answer, partly, is that everyone’s understandably a bit distracted right now, what with the enormity of the current job of getting us through the 2020-2021 year intact.  But the answer is also that to research any of these questions is probably beyond the data collection and analysis capacity of any single institution.  There needs to be co-operation.  And if there is one thing I have learned over the years, it’s that while Canadian institutions do co-operate on various matters, they are absolutely terrible at co-operating at new things for the first time.  Basically, where a table for concertation exists, things happen.  But if you must build a new table around an issue in order to spark communication, it can take months.  And if they have to lay their own money on the table to get things rolling?  Fuhgeddaboutit.

What Canada’s post-secondary system really needs is a Permanent Ad-hoc Council for Policy-Relevant Research (PACPRR…ok, the acronym needs work).  Imagine if dozens of institutions agreed to a permanent discussion table where ideas for research of wide, common value – such as the ones I’ve listed above – could be discussed and brought to fruition by coalitions of institutions, we might as a sector be able to answer key questions worth impressive sums of money. Of course, this is Canada, and where data on key education problems is concerned, I’ve learned not to hold my breath. 

On the other hand, if research like this is of interest, maybe get in touch with us.   Who knows, perhaps there is a coalition of the willing here.  Certainly, the stakes are high enough to warrant it.