Major Updates

  • Build Back Better Act Gets Pared Down
    President Biden and Democrats’ $3.5 trillion spending bill has been pared down to $1.75 trillion in light of a lack of full Democratic party support for the larger amount, and no Republican votes expected. The bill retained measures to significantly fund climate change initiatives and other priorities. Higher education took a significant cut, as the bill does not contain free community college for all, but does include education provisions including: 

    • $40 billion for workforce training and higher education, including increasing Pell grants annually by $550.
    • $400 billion for universal free pre-K to 3- and 4-year-olds, and reducing child care costs for working families earning up to $300,000 a year.

The bill still needs to work its way through votes in both the Senate and the House but the president has called for immediate movement on the bill. 

 

  • US Department of Education Holds First Round of 2021 Negotiated Rulemaking Sessions
    The Department of Education held the first round of the main committee sessions as well as the sessions specifically created for discussion on the 90/10 rule changes. The main committee generally is discussed topics like college affordability and student loans. Some other issues discussed included granting total and permanent disability discharges, Public Service Loan Forgiveness, improving access to closed school discharges, borrower defense to repayment, among others. The committee will reconvene in November and December. To view the recordings and materials from those sessions, and to sign up to register to attend future sessions, click here for the Department’s web page.

 

Other News

A common fact about hurricanes is that the greatest disruption and damage is caused when the storm enters an area and then departs it. A subtle calm is experienced as the eye of the hurricane often pauses over an area to sometimes gain strength. Higher education may be experiencing an eye of the hurricane scenario. In fact, some optimists were equivalently saying six months ago that “My institution is seeing the highest number of applicants ever…we’ll be fine” or “The pandemic, like other societal or economic tragedies has pushed people back to college,” only to be woken up to the harsh reality that many potential undergraduate students applied to “reach” schools or many more institutions than they might have otherwise applied to, given the lack of an SAT requirement.

 

With vaccination rates on the rise and booster shots entering society, higher education in the U.S. appears to be heading in the direction of “normal.” While there are still signs of the pandemic visible on campus, institutions are trying to portray some sense of normalcy with full stadiums during football games, a return to the dorms and the easing of restrictions on some campuses. However, we may be in the eye of the storm regarding the credentialing of education. As we ease out of the pandemic, there are clear signs of higher education erosion: a recent report by the National Student Clearinghouse[i] shows that undergraduate enrollment continues its downward spiral. While some of these declines may be the result of unfavorable and expected demographic changes, much of it could be a result of other factors, such as lowered household incomes as a result of pandemic unemployment, a rapidly changing economy, and a potential lack of confidence that higher education credentials in the form of a degree are guarantees of employment.

 

The National Student Clearinghouse report also shows an increase over the last two years in terms of graduate certificate enrollments (+9%), as well as graduate degrees (+5.6%) in general. Further analysis shows:

  • Less selective institutions are seeing the greatest declines (-4.7%) over the past two years
  • The greatest declines have been among associate degree enrollments (-6.6% over the past year and -14.1% over the past two years)
  • Private four-year for-profit institutions also show a decline of 13.1% over the past two years for graduate enrollment
  • During the past two years, undergraduate enrollment has declined at nearly a 2-to-1 ratio between men (-9.3%) and women (-5.3%), although much of this was a result of declines experienced in Fall 2020.

 

So, what does this mean for professional, continuing and online (PCO) education units? PCO units will become more essential and valuable to the central parts of their institution, as they are seen as the early entrants and innovators to online education, the extension of the institution to business and industry, and the bridge for returning adults seeking their degree. However, the challenges they face are more daunting as they are likely to experience the following in their efforts to respond to the educational storm:

 

  • Filling Sand Bags to Avoid Floodwaters: During a hurricane, residents in low lying and waterfront areas build temporary walls to keep water from destroying their community. Higher education administrators will rush to fill their sand bags with more online degrees. After all, this helped save them with displaced campus-based undergraduate and graduate students during the early part of the pandemic. However, with so much supply in the market, institutions either need to race to the market to get market share or need to have a clear competitive difference in their program, whether that is quality, price, content uniqueness, brand, etc.

 

  • Preparing for the Future: With climate change a proven reality, communities in low lying areas are likely to experience another environmental crisis. Smart communities do not just plug holes and hope and pray for a different outcome in the future. They make meaningful long-term changes, such as after the San Francisco earthquakes happened, engineers and architects made dramatic changes to compensate for future disasters. Higher education can diversify its portfolio to be less degree dependent or more stackable or modular. Having consulted with a number of institutions during the pandemic, what is apparent are two ways of thinking: 1) innovating and changing for the future, or 2) resisting because of legacy thinking. The declines that are apparent in the National Student Clearinghouse study are clear indicators of future problems. Educational products and programs need to be designed for the future and not the past. Stackable credentials leading to the degree that hold value even before the degree has been earned will become more essential in the future.

 

  • Helping the Displaced: Storms and disasters displace people. People need to be rescued. The pandemic is a disaster where there are those that will need to be rescued economically and educationally. According to a recent New York Times article[ii], the pandemic shows that many young men have lost confidence in higher education or see it as having less value then entering the workforce. In addition, as K-12 pivoted, many young people entered college with less academic knowledge than previous classes. A recent study by McKinsey states that students are on average five months behind in mathematics and four months behind in reading[iii]. Will this have a trickle-down effect regarding student readiness in college? Will students have a lower likelihood for success in a traditional format and ultimately end up in a degree completion scenario later in life? PCO units should expect this. With male students leaving college and students in general being less prepared, along with the potential for mental health challenges, students may drop out of college at a higher rate than years past. PCO units need to be prepared to pick them up, but with greater value, such as the offering of certificates and badges.

 

  • Helping the Forgotten: During disasters, many people are forgotten because they are not vocal about their suffering or ignored in favor of the masses. The pandemic has disproportionately impacted people of color and has thus created a wider digital divide. McKinsey also reported that during the pandemic, Black and Hispanic students were more likely to receive lower-quality remote instruction or were more likely to receive no instruction[iv]. In addition, McKinsey also reports that indigenous communities also suffered from a lower quality education K-12 experience. This is further compounded by students of color not having access to the Internet or suffering through dial-up access[v]. It is the mission of many PCO units and of their central institutions to provide access and equity to those that underserved or ignored. While many people of color are fighting for educational equity, the pandemic only pushed them back further in terms of access to resources.

 

  • Leadership is Needed During a Time of Crisis: During any natural or man-made disaster, communities heal faster in the presence of strong and calming leadership. FEMA also encourages communities to be prepared in advance and to have strong leadership before, during and after a crisis. PCO units will need strong leaders, leaders that can help other parts of the institution see through the chaos and embrace innovation and risk taking. Faculty and administrators are likely to battle PCO units in their resistance to noncredit-to-credit pathways, stackable credentials and badges in favor of competing solely in fully online degrees. However, a strong leader will make the case for more customer-centric educational products and programs which (in many cases) may not be the degree. Faculty and administration have little experience in new credentials and a strong PCO leader will help them with their discomfort and anxiety through controlled experimentation, implementation and innovation of new credentials. 

 

  • Communication is Critical: During a disaster or crisis, communications systems often fail. Power lines may be down and fiber-optics severed. To survive a disaster, one of the first things that is done is to restore and rebuild communications, which in turn connect response teams with volunteers and to individuals in need. The pandemic has caused communication to shift. Digital communication is more prevalent and the use of technology more dependent. The PCO unit can be the critical link to the future of higher education, as it may have more advanced communications with business and industry, and with the community (especially adult learners). 

 

The pandemic is a natural disaster and without meaningful change, many institutions of higher education may fall victim to it. PCO can be one lifeline among many that an institution needs to better leverage to weather future storms.

 

[i] https://nscresearchcenter.org/stay-informed/

[ii] Carey, K., New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/upshot/college-admissions-men.html

[iii] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/covid-19-and-education-the-lingering-effects-of-unfinished-learning

[iv] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-and-social-sector/our-insights/covid-19-and-learning-loss-disparities-grow-and-students-need-help

[v] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cch

The Web is constantly evolving.  Emerging now is a more immersive 3D environment that features augmented reality (AU), virtual reality (VR), and persistent connections.  It is called the “Metaverse,” and it may transform online learning.

Coming out of science fiction is the vision of a three-dimensional Web in which we all are connected virtually, wherever and whenever we choose. In a synopsis by the futurist Thomas Frey, we find “Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, where humans, as avatars, interact with each other and software agents, in a three-dimensional virtual space that uses the metaphor of the real world.” 

In recent weeks and months, we have heard more about the trend toward a truly immersive virtual environment emerging online. Notably, Mark Zuckerberg is describing the future of Facebook as the emergence of the Metaverse. 

In recent week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his employees about an ambitious new initiative. The future of the company would go far beyond its current project of building a set of connected social apps and some hardware to support them. Instead, he said, Facebook would strive to build a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi — a world known as the metaverse. The company’s divisions focused on products for communities, creators, commerce, and virtual reality would increasingly work to realize this vision, he said in a remote address to employees. “What I think is most interesting is how these themes will come together into a bigger idea,” Zuckerberg said. “Our overarching goal across all of these initiatives is to help bring the metaverse to life.” 

So, one must ask, will this become a “real thing” or will it remain only a dream of reclusive techno-geeks who lack the social skills to thrive in the “real world?”

At the University of Illinois Springfield, I recall obtaining an “island” in Second Life some 15 years ago to experiment with building a virtual student union and classroom centers. A small number of students and colleagues would gather together virtually to chat and interact in front of an educational video screen in the union. It was a virtual exercise repeated many times, but the video, people, voiced/typed words, and their avatar representations were as real as anything we see and do in person or online. We could “fly” from one location to another; engage in discussions; view walls of artwork and academic papers. It became a venue for class sessions. And, all of it could be screen captured. According to an article on The Verge, others were doing similar work bridging the gap between humans and technology:

People were becoming digital land barons and selling virtual items in Second Life nearly two decades ago. Schools and businesses have opened satellite campuses in that world and others. Social 3D spaces like CyberTown long predate Second Life. Even before that, early virtual worlds popped up in the 1970s with text-based multiuser dungeons or MUDs. Many older worlds also inspired the kinds of utopian predictions we see around the metaverse today.

Today, I watch my 10-year-old grandson engage with Roblox and Minecraft, doing much the same types of construction and virtual engagement as I did with Second Life. His engagement, and that of many “gamers” and “coders” predates the current pandemic. However, in an important way, the Covid pandemic seems to have served to open many people’s minds to studying, working and living in a virtual world. Yet, while the Metaverse is far from complete; it is morphing and expanding every day in multiple ways, with a speed that exceeds the much-larger internet that contains it. For distance learning, it promises a persistent 24-hour venue through which synchronous, asynchronous, interactive, 3-D video can be delivered in virtual reality and even augmented reality modes to bridge the “real” world to cyberspace. 

Futurist speaker Thomas Frey notes that there are technological challenges that must be overcome to facilitate growth. “For example, there are the challenging issues of the internet infrastructure, the feasibility of having large numbers of participants interacting with each other in real-time, language barriers, and latency issues.” And, yet the rapidly-expanding 5G wireless networks are quickly spreading coast to coast with extremely low latency and high bandwidth characteristics that can handle seamless virtual reality and augmented reality. According to reports by Campus Technology, “(t)he augmented and virtual reality market will grow to more than eight times its current size over the next five years, making it the fastest-growing category among emerging devices, which include wearables and smart home devices.” 

What, then, are the deeper challenges of creating a Metaverse that would serve both education and, more broadly, society? Tom Wheeler of the Brookings Institution writes:

Issues such as personal privacy, marketplace competition, and misinformation only become greater challenges in the metaverse due to the interconnectedness of that phenomenon. Rather than being distracted by the shiny new bauble, policymakers need to focus on the underlying problems of the digital revolution, which won’t go away with new technological developments. Just what is this “metaverse”? Today’s online activity can be described as a 2D experience; the metaverse is a 3D experience that can utilize augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and persistent connections to create an immersive world. Rather than spending 20-30 minutes a day moving among apps, users spend hours in much more realistic activities. 

Where will higher education be located in the emerging Metaverse? Will colleges and universities host their own “islands” of campuses? Will virtual mega-malls of storefronts offer certificates and certifications hosted by a plethora of institutions? Will your institution be represented – welcoming virtual students from around the real word to engage in 3-D learning around the clock?

It is important that colleges and universities discuss the opportunities now. We must be prepared to help build the Metaverse if we are to ensure that there is a viable place for us in the virtual world of the future. Are you leading these discussions on your campus?


This article was originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching and Learning blog.

The placid ivy-covered walls and calm quad will remain when COVID is vanquished, but the university will never be the same. We are forever changed — by the disease and by the advance of technology and competition in this, the fourth industrial revolution.

It has been said that you could walk into a classroom at the dawn of the 21st century and it would be barely distinguishable from one at the dawn of the 20th century. Not just that the fixtures of the classroom were only slightly changed, but the pedagogy and practice were nearly identical. The professor, the “sage on the stage,” was up front at the lectern; the students were aligned in neat rows of writing-arm chairs — oftentimes seated below the elevated dais of the professor with an expensive textbook in the book bag at their feet. Students furiously hand-wrote notes (laptops were often banned due to the temptation to text or game instead of transcribing the “words of wisdom” of the professor). Assessments were based on multiple-choice answers to rote memorization questions. Sadly, perhaps you can find such lecture halls and practices on your own campus today.

Increasingly that is changing. The remote learning of 2020 has evolved toward true online learning in which refined pedagogies and practices are applied to ensure engagement and achievement of learning outcomes. Increasingly assessments are authentic and relevant to the workplace and society. They have become learning opportunities and demonstrations of application of knowledge rather than merely memorization tests. Mixed-mode teaching and learning are the norm, with synchronous and asynchronous online learning mixed with face-to-face options — each selected for the best elements of access and learning outcomes for the specific learning module.

Learning at a distance has not gone away with vaccinations, masking and testing; rather, the pandemic has accelerated the shift to distance learning. The advantages of technology-assisted learning are apparent. It opens access to the classroom for those who are place-bound for a whole host of reasons ranging from disability to job and family obligations and more. Distance learning allows for live engagement with environments outside the classroom. Distance learning practices enable students to replay lectures, conduct simulations at any time and collaborate with other students anytime and anyplace.

As campuses reopened, students and some faculty began insisting that the online and hybrid/blended delivery of classes continue on a wide scale in the wake of the pandemic. As breakthrough infections and associated pandemic conditions became the new normal, educators needed flexibility to move beyond Zoom and video lectures to create inclusive learning environments.

Much press was given to the prospect that students who were not comfortable with online learning would drop out of college. Surprisingly, though, the reverse seems to be true in many cases — a large number of learners are returning to colleges after having dropped out or stopped out years ago.

Yvette Mozie-Ross and her team last summer identified 2,700 students who left [the University of Maryland, Baltimore County] in good academic standing with at least 60 credits and who did not earn degrees elsewhere. They quickly launched a “Finish Line” campaign, offering application fee waivers and other support to dozens of students … Similar initiatives to re-enroll former students have taken hold at Morehouse College in Atlanta, which in February announced it would launch an online undergraduate program with adults who never completed college in mind. Morgan State University in Baltimore recently unveiled “Morgan Completes You,” a collection of 18 new interdisciplinary degrees programs designed for adults with some college experience but no degree.

It is clear that the percentage of online students is continuing to increase. The decades-long growth of online will be accelerated by the addition of students who are new to online courses, having taken them first during campus closures in the past two years. Wiley Education Services conducted a poll of college and university students, the results of which were reported in the Voice of the Online Learner 2021.

One-third of the more than 3,000 students Wiley polled that take some online courses said they would consider a move to fully online learning. More than half said they are so impressed by the value, implementation and flexibility of remote learning that they are considering enrolling in those programs … Those learners have clear expectations of what an overarching online program should contain. The first is faster paths to earn credentials … The second is flexibility, and that means several dates throughout the year to begin classes, far more asynchronous course options and an adjustable degree plan. The third is cost assistance.

Not only is the mode of delivery in the post-pandemic university going to shift to include more delivery alternatives, but the learning materials are also shifting from the traditionally published textbooks to a more targeted, up-to-date assembly of open educational resources. This shift is motivated not only by the cost of the traditional text, but also by the advantages of open online materials to address specific topics chosen by the instructor that may not be deeply addressed in a broadly adopted text. Framingham State University is an example of this shift.

While Framingham State faculty are participating in OER training provided by the state of Massachusetts, providers such as Open Stax and the Open Education Network have over the last several years scaled up the quality of peer-reviewed — mostly online — open educational resources, González adds. The library also sends out a newsletter to faculty covering the latest trends in OER. “We’re at that tipping point where there’s a lot of interest, whereas before there were a lot of questions in terms of the quality,” González says. “Right now, the materials that are available are so rich, we want to pass that tipping point by providing support.”

The successful university to which students return post-pandemic will be significantly different from the one they left for remote learning in 2020. The new normal will be technology enhanced and accessibility committed. The path to a successful future is paved with responsiveness to student needs, accessibility, connectedness to society and to the workplace. Are you part of building that path at your university?

This article was originally published in Inside Higher Ed’s Transforming Teaching + Learning blog.