After the COVID-19 crisis: Why higher education may (and perhaps should) never be the same

Abstract

Universities and colleges have dragged their feet making the move to online teaching and learning. Suddenly, with this COVID-19 crisis, everyone had to move online. Few universities or colleges are prepared for such a rapid shift. Meanwhile, the conventional wisdom remains - the gold-standard for learning is traditional face-to-face, while online is second-best. But perhaps, even without COVID-19, in-person learning is ripe for radical transformation. At the University of Illinois, we’ve been researching this transformation, and developing and testing online learning solutions. Simply put, online can be completely different, and with the right tools, potentially much superior to in-person teaching. To reap the benefits of online learning, we need to abandon the current generation educational technologies—systems and processes that mostly do little more than reverse-engineer traditional classrooms.