As UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced another lockdown in England, members of the higher education profession must find themselves wondering just how they are going to continue delivering a high quality product in an increasingly disrupted world. Thankfully, the technology exists to ensure that lessons and seminars and department meetings can go ahead, without too much disruption.
Whilst at the beginning of the first lockdown all the way back in March, 49% of higher education professionals felt prepared for online teaching and all that it entailed, given the months of preparation that they and their institutions have undergone, it would not be surprising if professionals within the sector feel better prepared this time around. Their confidence will no doubt be assisted by support that they have received from their institutions in developing acceptable ways in which to teach and offer support to students.
The use of Zoom and and Webex helped keep university lectures during the first lockdown as they enabled lecturers and students to interact with one another wherever they were, as long as both had a device which could access the internet. Some in the sector viewed the use of these tools as merely a short term solution, and called for a greater push toward online education in the long term.
In the long term, there will no doubt be some pushback against online learning becoming a mainstay from both students and teachers, but if the cycle of virus surges and lockdowns is to become a permanent feature of our lives, a solution must be found. A few suggestions have been made that could be quite effective.
Many of these suggestions such as the use of a programme that contains a vast array of media that is properly sequenced to aid in engaging and stimulating students and can add content which challenges or assists students whilst enabling the development of research and critical thinking skills would necessitate the use of either data (which comes with its own legal challenges) or AI to assist in the education process.
On the question of how to handle assessments in the age of Covid, there are of course challenges. In order to make the assessment authentic, accessible appropriately automated and continuous and secure, universities will have to ensure their data infrastructure is up to scratch and able to maintain a complex web of data points that will need to be analysed after being produced by a variety of different media forms.
To ensure that cheating and plagiarism do not rise the use of e-proctoring systems to invigilate online exams or software that can detect whether work submitted may have come from another source will be vital. The latter software is already in use for essays submitted to universities, its expansion and refinement will be essential. Furthermore, to reduce the stress placed on teachers to mark assessments whilst retaining their authenticity, universities could use AI and adaptive comparative judgements (which automates comparison between scripts) to automate some elements, whilst adding human feedback.
As England enters another lockdown, and as other countries either consider doing the same or have done the same, higher education institutions are going to be faced with a stark choice. They must either keep their campuses open (in England campuses are allowed to remain open, though online teaching is encouraged) and risk the spread of the virus, or they must shut their campuses down and trust that their online systems work. Given the nature of the virus, without a vaccine, the solutions to the challenges and delivery of higher education provision will increasingly hinge on technology. Institutions must do a quick audit to assess their technology resource base and work out a long term technology map. Their future more than ever before will depend on the likes of Zoom, Webex, Moodle and Blackboard.
International Higher Education 