Tag: covid19

Coronavirus (5) – Admissions

Today I want to talk a little bit about what’s going to happen to university admissions worldwide over the next couple of months, and why the chaos looks set to last well into the fall, even if everyone re-opens in the late summer.  I will group the “chaos causers” into three and talk about them in ascending order of chaos. The domestic undergraduate recruitment cycle ended early.  Domestic students often take the spring to figure out where they are going, and

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Coronavirus (4) – “Moving Online”

One of the most annoying things about the last couple of weeks – apart from the general collapse of civilization – has been everyone and their dog claiming they are “moving classes online”.  I really wish we had found another word for this, because if there is one thing universities and colleges are NOT doing, it is transitioning to online education. It must be especially galling if you’re, say, at Athabasca University and produce real, high-quality online content all the

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Coronavirus (3)

I wrote my first coronavirus post a week ago and it was about travel policies and next year’s international student intake.  We’ve come a long way in a week.  As I said on Thursday, this is probably an all-virus blog for the next bit because it’s not clear there is anything else worth writing about (though: if y’all would prefer this blog to focus on the usual miscellany because 24/7 COVID is too depressing, let me know.  I can adapt.) On Thursday, Laurentian

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Coronavirus (2)

Things are happening so quickly that I am starting to think I need to temporarily turn this blog into a full-on everyday Coronavirus feed.  A lot has happened since Monday. Overseas: In Austria, the government has told all universities to halt lectures and move online as much as possible.  It is unclear from the stories I have read whether there this is an open-ended or time-limited decision.  Greece closed all of its universities on Tuesday for a period of two weeks. 

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Coronavirus

Good morning and welcome back.  I thought I would start the week off with a really cheery topic, like a global pandemic and how it will affect higher education. There are lots of ways to talk about the effects of coronavirus on higher education, but broadly, they come down to two different strategies to contain the spread of the virus: travel restrictions and social distancing.  Obviously, the most important travel bans concern full self-imposed quarantine zones in places like Hubei province

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