So, it’s that time of year when I say farewell to faithful readers for a few months.  This is the last blog of the academic year.  Normal service will resume August 30^th.

Today also marks the end of this blog’s tenth year.  Which, you know, is a bit terrifying.  Because that means this blog is probably over a million words old.  I’m sure my mother would have preferred I spent all that time on a doctorate.  (You should think about that, too, faithful readers: how many books could you polish off each year if you weren’t spending time on this blog?  I’d guess I probably cost people about two a year).  However, you all seem to still be interested in the stuff I have to say, so the show will go on.  But if you have any suggestions for the blog: what you’d like more of, what you’d like less of, etc, please let me know via info@higheredstrategy.com.

I’m not sure I can say very much about the year now past that hasn’t been said already.  Several times.  At varying levels of volume/annoyance/outright frustration. I think all I can add to that is a personal note of thank you to everyone who works in the sector.  It’s been a hard year, not the one everyone would have wanted.  And as a sector we haven’t been able to provide students with everything they need and deserve.  But within the limits of what was possible, I know people gave their all to make this a rewarding few semesters.  And so, to all of you: a very sincere thank you.  I know it wasn’t easy, but you gave it your all.

(Also, to my own team at the soon-to-be-reopened HESA Towers, a huge thank you.  It was rough sailing for awhile last Spring, but we have some very big days ahead of us, some of which we’ll be able to announce publicly in August).

Looking forward, I have only a few points to make (and if you want to see these in more detail, check out my keynote address to the University of Alberta’s Festival of Teaching and Learning from last week). Basically, they come down to this:

• We spent a lot of public money to get through this crisis.  That likely means less public money for post-secondary education in the future.
• While most traditional students hated on-line learning, they’d like to keep certain features, like automatic lecture capture.  Meeting that desire will raise costs.
• An awful lot of non-traditional students prefer remote teaching because it saves a lot of time.
• A fair number of profs kind of dig remote teaching as it permits several types of interaction that in-person teaching does not.

The big shakeout in post-COVID higher education is going to be how to match students and professors with who are most interested in online learning.  On the one hand, its tempting to say, as Ryerson’s Karim Bardeesy did in this Toronto Star Op-Ed, that every university (and perhaps every professor) needs to find a way to reach out to these students.  My feeling is that this would be a huge waste of effort.  The better way to deal with this is for three or four institutions to go big on remote education and make that a core part of their business plan and education offerings.  The problem is that a lot of universities still view online education as being infra dig, so it probably won’t be any of the U-15s who take this route (though University of Alberta could certainly give it a shot if it is really giving a hard re-think to its business operations).  More likely it will be mid-sized universities with a deep desire to shore up their finances (Memorial?  Windsor?  Ontario Tech?) who will push the envelope.

At least I hope so.  It would be a shame to waste whatever positives came out of the past year.

And similarly, I really hope that all the focus on pedagogy over the past 15 months – all the intense thinking that all instructors have done about pedagogy – does not go to waste.  If there is one thing that drives me to absolute distraction about Canadian universities, it is the convention that course design and pedagogy is something left to the individual professor rather than to the department or program.  I think, on the whole, there was an awful lot of pedagogical exchange between instructors over the past year and a bit – the question is how do you keep that exchange and learning going?  Clearly, there needs to be a way to institutionalize that ongoing learning and development: the biggest worry I have about a “return to normal” is that we jettison that learning as well.  If there is one priority institutions need to prioritize over the next six months or so, it is this.  Institutions that work out how to do it will see much success over the coming decade: the others must struggle to adapt.

Anyways: everybody enjoy a peaceful and restful summer.  Vaccines are working, and the fall will be a lot more “normal” than you think.  The only question, really, is how to make sure the new normal is more inclusive and more innovative than the old one. 

See you on August 30.