CHAPEL HILL – ‘Disruptive’ can be a loaded term. But if anything’s been disruptive to higher education – in North Carolina and around the world – it’s the coronavirus.
Jim Ptaszynski, Vice President for Digital Learning for the University of North Carolina System, put the enormity of UNC institutions’ abrupt shift to remote learning into stark perspective last week.
“The changes brought on by COVID-19 are unprecedented,” Ptaszynski told Forbes. “… The UNC System has over 250,000 students, 15,000 full-time faculty and 30,000 staff members. We had 50,000 classes this spring semester that needed to move online in a matter of two weeks.”
While some view online instruction as a gift of access and flexibility – especially for nontraditional students – some faculty have resisted remote learning.
In just 10 days, though, the UNC System office put together “Moving to Alternative Instructional Formats,” a 35-page digital guide to online coursework for instructors. In the first hour the guide was available, Ptaszynski said, it was downloaded 1,000 times.1
NOT THAT it’s all gone smoothly – there have been hiccups and discomfort for some instructors.
“I’m suddenly teaching my college class online (something I have never done before and which, for now, at least, seems cold and distant; I can’t ‘feel’ the classroom anymore),” wrote Allen Johnson, Executive Editorial Page Editor of the Greensboro News & Record, who teaches a class at N.C. A&T.
In an upbeat video from UNC Greensboro, Provost Dana Dunn asks students to understand that the university is improvising.
“Please be patient. It won’t be perfect. Know we’re learning as you are,” Dunn says. “We’ll work together. We can do this.”2
Those of us who live in urban centers with lightning-fast fiber also don’t always realize how Internet access remains a challenge for many rural North Carolinians.
“It’s great that we’ll have the ability to teach many classes online, but that doesn’t much help a student who can’t log on from home,” wrote Leslie Boney, Director of NC State University’s Institute for Emerging Issues.
“Despite significant progress in the past few years, almost 18 percent of North Carolina households have no internet access, and those are disproportionately located in the rural areas of the state,” he wrote.3
That’s why part of the Carolina Student Impact Fund has been used to provide Internet access for some students, UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said last week.4
UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State have raised at least $1.1 million in emergency aid for students,5 and each institution in the UNC System has established such a fund.
In other instances – even in urban areas – Internet speed has slowed significantly as millions of North Carolinians track response to the virus online.6
BUT LIKE IT OR NOT, there’s no question the virus has forced changes in delivery of higher education.
“The coronavirus has forced an amazing and immediate transition as most educational institutions have shifted to online education for this semester and possibly longer,” Paul N. Friga, an Associate Professor in the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill, wrote for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Buck Goldstein, University Entrepreneur in Residence at UNC-Chapel Hill, senses the jolt to traditional teaching.
“My Zoom skills have increased exponentially but I still have a long way to go. When the dust settles, the genie will be out of the bottle and higher ed will never be the same,” Goldstein says in his newsletter this week.
“Tens of thousands of professors who believed online education was unthinkable will, at the very least, understand it is possible and in some cases desirable,” he writes.7
Ptaszynski envisions the possibilities as well.
“Time will tell,” he told Forbes. “Some may see the benefit of incorporating online learning elements into traditional classroom activities. Others may look forward to going back to the way things were….
“This is a watershed moment for higher education. We all need to demonstrate patience and kindness with each other, as we all grapple with and adjust to this urgent challenge and work through the process of supporting our staff, faculty and students.”8
1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisongriffin/2020/03/26/a-system-wide-solution-to-online-education-look-to-north-carolina/#10c54c7858c9.
2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbZDjmvuFGs&feature=youtu.be, 2:56-3:02.
3 https://www.wral.com/coronavirus/leslie-boney-coping-with-covid-19-reveals-serious-broadband-gaps/19031107/. See also: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/coronavirus/article241424026.html.
4 https://www.wral.com/coronavirus/no-word-yet-on-refunds-graduation-plans-at-unc-chapel-hill/19030410/.
5 https://www.newsobserver.com/news/coronavirus/article241526576.html.
6 https://www.wraltechwire.com/2020/03/25/report-internet-speeds-down-20-in-raleigh-22-in-fayetteville-stable-in-durham/.
7 https://mailchi.mp/4f92dc9affd1/our-higher-calling-newsletter7-12170903.
8https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisongriffin/2020/03/26/a-system-wide-solution-to-online-education-look-to-north-carolina/#10c54c7858c9.
Art Padilla says
I am continually amused by the fulsomeness and hyperbole of descriptions about the shift to “online” classes in the University courses.
It’s not difficult or expensive to shift very quickly to online. A shift to great online instruction is something else altogether. Lousy online classes are modern-day versions of electronic correspondence courses. Those who remember correspondence classes will recall large three ring binders and weekly lessons and pre-paid, mail-in assignments and homework. Most online stuff is like that, except of course it’s done on a laptop. Most faculty can very quickly, nearly effortlessly, email their syllabi and their assignments and PowerPoint slides, presto, there’s an online class.
Great remote teaching and learning involves in part amazing technology on both ends, which is quite rare; clever podcasts and videos, which are even rarer; face-to-face discussions; and timed and secure exams.
A few disciplines and even fewer students lend themselves more readily to remote teaching and learning. Most don’t. Just as the old correspondence courses required great discipline and motivation, so do boring, average online classes.
If all we offered were online classes, student interest and enrollments would, I fear, plummet.
Of course, over-caffeinated cyber enthusiasts will vehemently declare from their laptops this is all wrong. They will point to “metrics” and to anecdotal studies of “rubrics” showing that online classes are equivalent to face-to-face ones. So will board members who’ve never taught a college class or set foot inside a great university. As one who developed and taught one of the first ever online classes, and also as a department head who supervised faculty who taught both ways, I can tell you they are not equivalent.
Many years ago, I gave the keynote at an international conference in Aspen where the topic of technology and computers in the classroom were central topics. I noted that remarkable advances had been made in using the computer in research, and that in certain instructional activities, like calculus, the computer had transformed instruction. But also I noted then that if a fellow from 1900 were to land on a New York street in 2000, he would be totally lost. However, if a professor from 1900 were tele-transported into a 21st century classroom, he would pick up the chalk (or white board marker) and start lecturing. This is still true today.
Art Padilla
Wrightsville Beach & Raleigh, NC
Former senior officer in the UNC system and at NC State U
Emeritus professor, UNC-CH; NC State U; U Arizona
Sara Stevens says
Some students may also learn they can obtain the majority of their education on-line, live at home, save lots of money due to the massive un-necessary overhead and fat many universities have. Reward no massive debt when graduated and a degree they can actually do something with… without a lot of fluff.