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Are Colleges Ready for a Different Kind of Teaching This Fall?

By Beth McMurtrie May 05, 2020

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Are-Colleges-Ready-for-a/248710

Skeptical students and their parents don’t seem willing to pay full price for an experience similar to what they lived through this semester. If virtual learning is mandatory this fall, one survey found, two-thirds of students will expect discounts on tuition and fees. Some may avoid enrolling altogether.

Education experts who have been following higher education’s transition to remote learning say that colleges need to act now if they want to be fully prepared for the fall.

Colleges should start by evaluating what went well, and poorly, this spring, so they can start identifying gaps in training, planning, and technology, he says. They should also assess their campus resources to begin preparing instructors for the fall. They may find that instructional designers, academic-technology experts, and faculty members familiar with online tools and teaching are less effective because they are spread thinly across campus, not centrally deployed.

Effective online teaching, Wade says, depends more on building engagement than on mastering complicated technology.

At the University of Central Florida, Thomas B. Cavanagh, vice provost for digital learning, estimates that more than 80 percent of its 1,600 faculty members had received some form of professional development for teaching online before the coronavirus hit, ranging from self-paced training on how to use the learning-management system to the university’s 10-week online-course-design program. Given the need to rapidly prepare hundreds of instructors, says Cavanagh, the university is in the process of developing a streamlined three-week course, “essentials of online teaching,” through which it expects to train around 200 instructors. About 350 instructors will also take a short course called “teaching through lecture capture — Zoom edition,” he says.