Higher education has never experienced a more digitally technologized era than right now. Colleges have been forced to respond to an array of emerging 21st-century challenges. Students demand more flexibility and portability, as well as high-quality education. Institutions continue to seek ways to reach more nontraditional students. And now as they face the disruptive effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, colleges are looking to high-tech learning and teaching for solutions like never before.
Over the summer, deals were struck between colleges and private companies much more often as the cost of many digital tools decreased or at least leveled off. Many institutions took the opportunity to ramp up efforts to bridge the digital divide and reach students who have been forced by the pandemic to learn off campus. Washington State University, for example, purchased “loaner” laptops and hot spots to make sure students have access to remote education.
But tech is burgeoning beyond the realm of learning tools and into every part of campus. Agreements with tech companies reflect accelerating efforts to move advising, counseling, and tutoring services online, gather and analyze more student data, and push more traditional courses into the online realm for the longer term.
Systems for learning management, which offers ways to share syllabi and report grades, among other functions, and online-program management continue to expand.
Faculty members, who are increasingly required to convert traditional lecture and lab courses into online sessions, will also be expected to learn even more about these technologies.
Since March, when colleges were forced to deliver more courses to students off campus, institutions have ramped up their digital assessment and pedagogical tools, including language-translation technology, lecture-capture software that records lessons, polling and quizzing apps, proctoring software, videoconferencing programs, and virtual whiteboards and discussion boards. Most of these technologies are designed specifically to convert face-to-face campus experiences into remote ones, so students can learn and be tested while at home.
While there is a wide range of opinion about the efficacy of these tools — for example, many see lecture-capture tech, long used in massive open online courses (MOOCs) so lessons could be viewed later, as too one-dimensional to be compelling viewing for today’s students — a preponderance of colleges has put several of them to use. Their prevalence will only increase, experts predict, even as institutions debate internally how much of their teaching will be done in person, online, or via a hybrid of the two.
Some institutions, motivated by the current moment, have invested more in tech to make education more affordable. The University of Pikeville, mindful of its place in economically depressed eastern Kentucky, has emphasized using more open-educational resources, or OER, as one way to deal with inequality in higher
education. By making more OER available, and thus eliminating the considerable cost of textbooks, colleges may be able to keep more low-income students in college during the pandemic and beyond.
OER can also be used to update courses that have long resisted revision, college officials say. To make a move to mostly open texts more palatable for faculty members, Pikeville and other colleges have given educators a budget to purchase non-open materials. This allows them to retain the freedom to choose texts while tapping a central university budget that eliminates the costs students would normally pay to buy those books.
Learning-analytics tools are also on the rise. These typically employ algorithms to measure how students’
behavior is affecting their learning. These technologies bring fairness and privacy concerns with them. Some college officials worry that algorithms may make ethnic and racial inequality worse or that using
an algorithm that “nudges” a student who hasn’t spent the required amount of time with a digital text, as some of the analytical tools do, might be unethical. Learning-management systems (LMS) and learning analytics also raise a host of concerns about student-data privacy.
Some institutions, motivated by the current moment, have invested more in tech to make education more affordable.
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If anything has proved that higher education must rely more on tech tools, it is Covid-19. A majority of campuses nationwide have closed their campuses or severely curtailed in-person activities, necessitating a major shift toward hybrid and online learning.
Tech advancements that were predicted to occur in the next five to seven years are now being anticipated many years sooner, experts say. Some are emerging now.
Colleges that have for years used certain types of technology are now seeking more from those tools during the pandemic. Sometimes, those systems aren’t up to the task.
Some institutions that have used online-program management (OPM) tools run by for-profit operators have reported trouble this summer. Such programs typically haven’t allowed colleges to ramp up large numbers of digital courses as fast as they now need to. Colleges should consider adding online-management infrastructure of their own to design and spin out more online courses out more quickly, while relying on vendors to handle secondary functions, such as marketing, says Joshua Kim, director of online programs and strategy at Dartmouth College.
Covid-19 has also changed how many college administrators and faculty members think about technology. In the past, many institutions viewed online teaching as something of “an instructional snow day”— a temporary disruption during which less would be expected of faculty members and students. But the pandemic represents anything but a brief detour from the traditional path of higher education. The current moment brings with it a demand for more technology and better learning. It represents a call to change.
Engaging students online is harder than doing so in person, teaching and learning experts say. Getting and keeping students’ attention remotely presents educators with a major challenge.
Faculty members are now more often expected to take the time to master course-development software and other tech tools that can help them create compelling courses.
Beyond the time and training this requires, faculty members now have to think through a number of emerging models of education. Converting longstanding lecture or lab courses requires not just some level of tech savviness, but new types of creativity. Educators need to rethink which traditional teaching methods
and tools to bake into their remote courses and what digital aspects they should bolt on to them, says Kenneth C. Green, director of the Campus Computing Project.
Faculty members are now more often expected to take the time to master course-development software and other tech tools that can help them create compelling courses.
One advantage moving forward is that a growing number of faculty members now see the need and the value in creating online courses, as well as working with digital apps to engage students and attending training sessions on tech.
The downside for many of them is pay. One recent survey found that teaching online has added 40 or more additional hours of work per course. Most faculty members who put in the extra time aren’t being compensated for it, something faculty unions have taken note of.
Long before Covid-19, institutions that had helped faculty members learn how to design courses and teach online would often spend a full semester training them, and then offer follow-up support for a year or more after that. The pandemic has shredded that timetable. The message to faculty members from college administrators and campus teaching and learning centers is to cram: Learn the skills now.
Some institutions have stepped up tech training. At the University of Pikeville, faculty members can earn
badges and certificates for learning how to use instructional tech, including an introductory badge for mastering 10 or so basic skills. Like other colleges, Pikeville has designed learning opportunities that
fit a variety of disciplines, while making multiweek classes available so faculty members can better understand how to use their campus’s LMS.
Leaders at some institutions say that things are moving too fast for badges. At Georgetown University, a summer-long program drew in 80 percent of the faculty for a crash course in online teaching. San Diego State University and Vanderbilt University also ran faculty-tech programs this summer. Some but not all colleges have paid faculty members to take part in training sessions.
To help get faculty members up to speed while reducing their anxieties about teaching their classes digitally, the University of Florida’s online-learning department put together a suite of services. UF Online offers faculty assistance and training in the design of remote courses, tips for creating syllabi online, and strategies to make online learning vital for students. Key to the effort is making sure each college within
the university has an online specialist on hand to help faculty members.
The inequality within education is mirrored in its treatment of the faculty. Tech-training programs rarely filter down to adjunct professors and part-time instructors, whose presence at colleges has long been on the rise. Without programs to help them along, the quality of online education will suffer, says Phil Hill, an
educational-technology market consultant.
Tech-training programs rarely filter down to adjunct professors and part-time instructors, whose presence at colleges has long been on the rise.
The transition to a high-tech campus will not go smoothly for many institutions. Smaller colleges with small or no endowments will be challenged by the cost of technology. Colleges that have traditionally relied on residential students as the linchpin of their financial model will likely struggle to update and upgrade.
Those that can afford to make sweeping efforts to stay on top of tech will face fresh challenges. While many colleges now use data-analysis tools in a variety of ways, including as early warning systems that help them diagnose which students are having trouble, they shouldn’t scrimp on the staff needed to reach those students. Many colleges, inspired by the model of Georgia State University, have bought the tools to sift quickly through student data. But they haven’t followed the rest of the game plan instituted by Georgia State, which added 180 staffers to make contact with students and teachers, Green, of the Campus Computing Project, says.
Meanwhile, data-privacy concerns continue to mount — and will for the foreseeable future. Observers and faculty members worry that private LMS companies will scoop up and perhaps disseminate student data.
In the end, experts foresee a range of college responses to an increasingly technological world. While some institutions will invest more in creating curricula and scheduling based on online education, others will retrench, becoming more focused on delivering high-quality, in-person instruction.
Most colleges will split the difference, putting more online classes to work when it fits their students’ needs, while maintaining a strong in-person presence, post-pandemic. They’ll likely ask themselves the question, “What is the best way we can engage and teach students at this moment?”
No matter which way they go, colleges and their faculty will be measured by the quality of their teaching. Finding ways to use technology to gain and keep student attention will become the overriding concern for faculty members — and for institutions looking to survive Covid-19 and the years beyond.
“Education Technology in the Covid Era” was written by Michael Anft. The Chronicle is fully responsible for the report’s editorial content. @2020 by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced without prior written permission of The Chronicle. For permission requests, contact us at copyright@chronicle.com
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