Lessons Learned From the Pandemic Will Forever Shape Higher Education

In February 2020, colleges and universities were operating normally. Then the pandemic hit, and institutions had to quickly pivot and transition to a new normal.

As a group, colleges and universities in the U.S. adapted to the great pandemic such that we still graduated and enrolled everybody, expanded our research activities and had great intellectual achievements, according to Michael Crow, President, Arizona State University, in the keynote session, The Shape of the College of the Future, kicking off the REMOTE: The Connected Faculty Summit hosted by Arizona State University, June 9-10. The summit presented 84 sessions over two days, designed to showcase best practices, techniques and tools that provide actionable insight to higher education faculty in the area of online education.  

While the pandemic presented myriad issues, higher education stepped up to meet the challenges. “We showed that universities could adjust quickly,” Crow said. “It turns out that universities are highly adaptive, technology-driven, scientifically-enabled institutions that can weather complicated moments in time in history.”

For the keynote session, Crow hosted Freeman A. Hrabowski, President of University of Maryland – Baltimore County and Kristina Johnson, President of Ohio State University. The three university presidents discussed how institutions coped with the pandemic, and how applying some of the lessons learned will help colleges and universities change courses, departments and the structure of their institutions to improve teaching and learning in the years ahead.

The pandemic presented higher education with an unprecedented opportunity for learning. In terms of what we have learned in the midst of a global pandemic and in a time of social upgrade, Hrabowski said that we’re learned that we have so much more to know and to learn. “For us, as we look at what we’ve done with our students at UMBC, we’ve learned that we have to keep an open mind and understand that uncertainty doesn’t have to be a bad thing, that we have to be willing to take risks and think out of the box and that technology will be more important than ever,” he said. “We also have to keep in mind that success is never final. We are constantly evolving and should not be comfortable where we are, and we shouldn’t be thinking about returning to the good old days prior to COVID. We can be so much better than we were before.”

According to Johnson, who was chancellor of the State University of New York (SUNY) system when the pandemic began, we’ve learned that academics can be nimble, agile and make fast decisions. “We learned we had to pivot on a dime and we converted 18,000 courses to online within two weeks,” she explained. “We also learned we had to make decisions when we didn’t have the time or the data.” Technology-based decision-making also was helpful, Johnson added, explaining that data showed that classroom transmission of the disease was eliminated once class sizes were reduced to 50 students.

Using Technology in New Ways

Crow explained that years ago, ASU decided it couldn’t fulfill its mission for egalitarian access without technology, so it began embedding technology after technology into its learning environment, which helped it prepare for the pandemic. “But it also subjects us to constant abuse,” he quipped. “For instance, if you’re learning online, it can’t be any good. So, there’s a bias against technology for enhancing learning. We all used technology in new ways during the pandemic.”

“People are biased against things they don’t know well, if they’ve had bad experiences or if they’re not comfortable with them,” Hrabowski explained. “Colleagues who had already begun doing things online had already understood that a hybrid approach and sometimes remote learning can be effective. Amazingly, faculty evaluations for remote learning for the past semester were actually higher than those for the same courses presented face-to-face. Part of it is focusing on what faculty can do to make sure students are grasping the concepts.” And interestingly, some professors found that courses offered online were intimate teaching experiences, since all participants were in their home settings and communicating effectively electronically. 

Hrabowski explained that universities are using technology for everything from admissions to retention, to understand students, and to understand and meet the needs of faculty as well. “Technology can be used as a tool to help us be even more effective in human relationships,” he noted.

Hrabowski also added that institutions must never stop learning how they can be better. “We’re going to be using technology more and more, but our driving forces are people – students, faculty, staff and alumni – and pushing the envelope in our knowledge. For us, the fundamental part that won’t change is how we can be much better.” To that end, he said, UMBC will use machine learning and data science to understand the student experience and analytics to make decisions, and using technology to understand what’s happening with staff and faculty and help them adjust to the new normal.