COVID-19 prompted a swift pivot to remote learning across higher education in 2020, exposing challenges in the technological infrastructure and financial sustainability that had been festering at many institutions for years.
In the long term, however, the staggering disruption to higher education’s traditional residential, face-to-face delivery model may also have an upside: a radical reimagining of the way colleges and universities conduct operations and serve their students.
Emergency remote education has inspired a burst of innovation on most campuses and set the groundwork for what’s next. Lecturers have reimagined courses that have been untouched for years. Academic leaders have revised calendars to offer more flexibility for students. Campus officials have modified a range of services—from academic advising to career counselling—to offer them remotely. And campuses, like much of the corporate world, have moved to a remote work environment using a variety of tools to support the administration of the institution.
Now, as higher education leaders plan for what their institutions will look like on the other side of the pandemic, the decisions they make in the coming months will have ramifications for years—even decades. With presidents and governing boards already confronting growing uncertainty—enrollment and revenue shortfalls and major demographic shifts—colleges may be reluctant to embrace even more of it. That said, a once-in-a-generation opportunity could exist for institutions to harness their new investments (and learning) in digital technology to enhance the student experience and the shift to some remote work.
Twenty years ago, colleges and universities faced an inflection point, although not in a moment of national crisis. The internet was popularising the idea of learning online. But rather than take advantage of the new medium and a new population of students, traditional colleges ceded the online learning market largely to for-profit providers.1 The growth spurt of those colleges in the first decade of the new millennium forced many traditional higher education institutions to play catch-up in the online space over the past decade.2
Traditionally, universities had erected divisions between the online and in-person experience, often with different management structures, tuition rates, degree requirements and faculty compensation. At colleges that offered online programmes, students often couldn’t mix and match online and face-to-face experiences. More importantly, even if residential students could enrol in online classes, they had to navigate the brick-and-mortar campus in order to access most services, such as financial aid, counselling, or academic and career advising, not to mention all of the other unstructured residential learning opportunities only afforded to those within the confines of the campus.
Right now, the stakes are high for institutions to place the right bets. Overall, enrollment fell 4% in fall 2020, with the number of first-year students dropping by a staggering 13%.3 By one estimate, the pandemic has cost colleges at least US$120 billion.4 At the same time, a demographic cliff is projected to arrive in 2026, when the number of students graduating from US high schools will significantly drop.5
Colleges enjoy a certain amount of brand loyalty based on the physical bonds that connect students to each other and their campuses. Once that physical campus was removed from the equation during the pandemic, however, many institutions lacked the digital infrastructure to engage students as a “community.” And students noticed: In one survey of 3,000 undergraduates, nearly 80% of respondents said their online courses lacked the engagement of in-person classes.6
There were some exceptions. Those institutions that already had a robust set of digital tools in place—such as Georgia State University,7 Duke University,8 Arizona State University, University of Central Florida, and University of Michigan9—found the shift to the hybrid environment smoother because they understood how their institutions should serve the needs of learners both in person and virtually. Arizona State, for instance, added a new modality during the pandemic that combined its experience with online and face-to-face classes, called ASU Sync, which allowed students to watch a real-time, live broadcast of their in-person class.10
The experience of the pandemic has offered a radical opportunity for experimentation, encouraging institutions to rethink the overall operating model. As colleges and universities plan for their postpandemic future, they face a series of choices. They can either approach the exercise by returning to the old way of doing business, or they can select a range of hybrid approaches and reshape how their campuses operate, diversify their offerings, and differentiate themselves.
Higher education has long been seen as a traditional experience: Full-time students sequestered in a bucolic campus environment interacting in person with lecturers, staff members, coaches and classmates, rich with planned and unplanned interactions that comprise the student experience and “social learning.”
In contrast, the hybrid campus reimagines residential education in a tech-enabled world: a technology-enabled student experience. This is not only hybrid instruction, but rather a blended, immersive and digital residential experience that fuses the online and physical worlds across campus. It transcends the current concept of blended education, which too often focuses solely on classroom instruction that toggles between face-to-face and online. Instead, the hybrid campus can deliver everything an institution offers with a blended approach.
Think of the hybrid campus as similar to the retail model that sits somewhere between the physical and digital worlds, with little distinction between the two. Many retailers that started online also operate physical outlets to spark sales on their websites and increase customer loyalty. Most customers, however, don’t make a distinction between the two. The same thing happens when we shop at Home Depot, which started as a brick-and-mortar store: We don’t differentiate between buying online or driving to the store. What’s critical here for institutional leaders is not the technology necessarily but the changes to campus culture and operating models that go well beyond the acquisition and deployment of new tools.
The recent and sudden transition to purely remote operations unveiled the drawbacks of this bifurcated model when colleges aren’t strategic about what they’re doing in person and what they’re offering virtually. Understanding the distinction between the two is important as institutions reimagine the campus and decide which services deliver their best experience face-to-face and which could easily or more effectively be delivered online. The know-how gained during COVID-19 can provide important guidance for making such decisions and to institutionalise what they’ve already accomplished during the pandemic.
A hybrid approach will allow institutions to become more resilient during future disruptions, whether pandemics or natural disasters; help institutional leaders better manage costs and pedagogical demands; and, ultimately, become more student-centred. Moreover, this model can make higher education more accessible to a much broader population of learners: adults with some college education but no degree, those with degrees but seeking to improve their skills, and international students who wish to take advantage of a US education without relocating.
In the end, one potential lasting impact of COVID-19 in higher education is the belief and an urgency within institutions that they could remake legacy structures that have long been seen as intractable. New institutional frameworks and services were quickly established to support students in the pivot to online learning and then to get them back to campus.
As colleges and universities plan for their postpandemic future, they face a series of choices. The rest of this report discusses how some colleges are already changing and making this vision a reality and what needs to be done next in three key areas of the institution: academic affairs, student success and the campus workforce(figure 1). Not every campus will follow all the routes we lay out, nor are we suggesting that institutions flip a switch overnight and rely more on the digital model they adopted during COVID-19. But the investments colleges made in 2020 can get them closer to a hybrid strategy that combines the important elements of “place” with online and tech-enabled education.
Our conversations with university leaders during COVID-19 and additional research have identified three big shifts that need to happen in order for universities to become hybrid campuses. Because higher education is incredibly diverse and serves a wide population of learners, the paths each institution employs could be different. The strategies that follow are designed to serve as building blocks for the future of institutions. These ideas should not be taken as exhaustive or prescriptive, but rather as prompts to drive discussion and new ideas.
What’s happening now?
The pandemic has accelerated academic innovation to unprecedented levels on campuses, forcing many to rethink enrolment capacity, pricing, course delivery and assessment of student learning. Changes that were thought to take years to implement through shared governance—if ever—have been put in place almost overnight.
But fully remote education on residential campuses will come to an end when the pandemic is over. As students return to campuses, colleges and universities should think through what was learnt about online education during the pandemic and what their institutions should look like in the future. It’s clear that students want an in-person experience in some way. Whether that needs to happen in classrooms remains unclear, however. As hands-on, experiential learning becomes more important in a reshaped job market, experiential learning might be the focus of face-to-face interactions, while classroom material is largely delivered online.
Making the move toward hybrid in the near future
Making the move to hybrid for a longer horizon
While the concept of hybrid education is a new approach for many institutions during the pandemic, the concept of blending online and in-person classes has been somewhat routine at the University of Central Florida (UCF)21 for more than two decades.
Soon after the Orlando institution started online courses in the mid-1990s, university officials noted many of the students taking the classes weren’t distant learners but rather local students who liked the convenience and flexibility of virtual learning. As a result, the university added a blended format, what it calls “mixed mode,” in which the class meets face-to-face only once a week, and the rest of the work is shifted online. Nowadays, 90% of the university’s 59,000 undergraduates take blended or online classes. Students at UCF give the highest marks in satisfaction surveys to mixed-mode courses.
In an interview, university officials shared with us some of what they’ve learned about hybrid education and how those lessons might be applied to the expanded concept of the hybrid campus:
Plan for students to swirl. UCF has found that over the course of their undergraduate career, students typically move between online, blended and face-to-face classes. What’s more, each year, thousands take all three modes at once. Because students are swirling among modalities, a common campuswide student information system and LMS are necessary.
Train faculty to redesign their courses. UCF’s Center for Distributed Learning serves as a clearinghouse for online learning strategies and practices and as a hub of training for professors.
One element is a “mix map” that faculty members prepare to help decide what’s best delivered online and what’s better for in-person instruction. Such an approach could be useful in designing other hybrid elements on campuses. From its training modules, the university developed a free “blended learning toolkit,” which has been shared with other institutions.
Expect better space utilisation, but not huge savings. Because hybrid courses meet only once a week in person, UCF can, in theory, fit many more course sections in the same amount of space. But there are limits to how much the university saves on space. There are few universitywide classroom buildings; most classroom space is “owned” and scheduled by individual colleges within the university, which means that excess space in one college can’t easily be booked by another.
Improve student study spaces. With more students learning outside the formal classroom, UCF had to expand and improve common student study spaces. The university renovated five floors of its library, removing some of the stacks and adding additional study spaces, both individual and collaborative.
Think online, not “in line.” To improve the student experience by reducing wait times and student frustration, university officials are constantly monitoring their services and systems to see which can be better offered online.
What’s happening now?
Even before COVID-19, how we learn, how we work and how we engage with each other was changing at an unprecedented rate. However, colleges and universities were mainly focused on student success, and too often that was limited to retaining and graduating them. The reality is that the postpandemic economy will require constant reskilling and upskilling. Colleges are perfectly positioned to provide this training and education in small and large chunks if they think of themselves as serving learners throughout life rather than just as students during one moment in time.
This will require most institutions to provide a new student experience, in part by reducing the friction between residential and online delivery.
Making the move toward hybrid in the near future
Making the move to hybrid for a longer horizon
Since 2003, Georgia State University’s graduation rate has risen by 23 points, to 55%, with no gaps by race, ethnicity, or income.26 Those gains were made in part by robust data analytics that led to shifts in advising and instruction. While much of Georgia State’s services were delivered face-to-face, they were also built on a “digital backbone,” allowing the university to more easily pivot to hybrid models when the pandemic hit.
In an interview, university leaders discussed how Georgia State’s operating model and technology could be applied to the concept of the hybrid campus:
Use data to improve student outcomes. Georgia State was already using a set of risk factors to monitor students and reach out to them proactively if they were getting stuck. These risk factors must evolve to suit a hybrid environment: Are students logging into their classes? Are they logging onto other student systems at the university? Are they completing their assignments? In just the first few weeks of remote learning, the university triggered more than 3,500 alerts to academic advisers, who contacted those students. It’s one reason why officials identified that a high percentage of students—around 98%—were signing into their classes by the end of the spring term.
Offer student services that can be done virtually in a hybrid format. Georgia State offers video advising sessions to students, with about two-thirds of sessions initiated by advisers based on the university’s early alert system, because so many of them work off-campus. As a result, during the pandemic, it was an almost seamless transition to online-only advising, and the number of weekly advising sessions remained stable before and during the pandemic.
Employ artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies to enhance the student experience. Because students don’t always open their email communications from the university, Georgia State has a chatbot named Pounce (after its mascot) to communicate with students, sending reminders or answering common questions, as well as getting feedback from students quickly. For instance, when the university needed to know how many students had to remain in residence halls during remote education, it sent a chatbot message. Within 10 minutes, the university had answers from 40% of students in university housing.
Explore remote work opportunities to rethink work. The physical location of the university’s call centre, which houses staff members who answer many student questions about financial aid, closed during the pandemic. With staff working from home, calls could not come into a central location and then be routed to an agent. So the university moved to a ticket system where students fill out information online and agents call them back. Because the university now knows the questions being asked in advance of picking up the phone, they’ve doubled the number of cases resolved every day.
What’s happening now?
In response to COVID-19, colleges and universities have demonstrated a remarkable ability to rapidly transform the way they work. Once the pandemic hit, university workforces went to an almost entirely remote work environment. This shift has challenged the orthodoxy that all staff must be on campus to effectively support the needs of the campus community.
Many institutions are now looking beyond returning to the former status quo and are evaluating the potential to transform how work gets done across campus. Universities are evaluating which capabilities and services need to be delivered in person, and when services are more convenient or effective if delivered through a hybrid model that adapts to the changing needs of students, faculty, staff and other stakeholders. In fact, many participants of the New Era Forum told us that they were already taking steps to move to a hybrid delivery of services across a variety of areas such as financial aid, academic advising, wellness, career services, and telemedicine (figure 2). Participants also signalled a clear direction toward delivering hybrid services outside the classroom.
“When March arrived and everybody pivoted, we greatly accelerated the plans we had developed that were meant to roll out over a period of, say, three years, and we implemented many changes almost instantaneously.”
—Mark Becker, Georgia State University president
Making the move toward hybrid in the near future
Making the move to hybrid for a longer horizon
As the spread of COVID-19 has disrupted not just one but several terms of operations for college and university campuses, it’s become evident to governing boards and leadership teams that there is no going to back to the old normal when the pandemic is over.
But going beyond what the postpandemic campus will look like, what should it look like?
Whatever elements colleges adopt, reevaluating the basic functions of the legacy campus won’t be easy. Based on convenings of the New Era Forum and our research, there are several important actions college leaders and governing boards should consider to build support and effectively transition to a hybrid campus:
In the middle of this crisis, no one can predict the future, but we do know this: There are compelling reasons for lasting change that the pandemic has highlighted, and the cultural and operational shifts experienced under “emergency” conditions have illustrated that many changes previously considered off-limits in higher education are, in fact, quite implementable and potentially beneficial for the long term. The investments that were made into online education and the knowledge gained from the “grand remote education experiment of 2020”—both the benefits and the drawbacks—seem too potent to ignore. The time to design your version of the hybrid campus is now, before others define your future for you.
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