Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    College Advising
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
The Review

Plexiglass Won’t Save Us

Colleges have frittered the summer away on audacious and absurd reopening plans. It’s time to embrace remote learning instead.

By Jeffrey J. Selingo July 16, 2020
DiepZahneis_publichealth_sonofalan_0526.jpg
Son of Alan for The Chronicle

This spring we saw something that few people could have ever predicted — colleges across the country abruptly shifting, almost overnight, to digital education. But the pivot in response to the coronavirus pandemic was largely haphazard and make-do, with faculty members and institutions duct taping together learning-management systems and Zoom in order to finish out the semester.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

This spring we saw something that few people could have ever predicted — colleges across the country abruptly shifting, almost overnight, to digital education. But the pivot in response to the coronavirus pandemic was largely haphazard and make-do, with faculty members and institutions duct taping together learning-management systems and Zoom in order to finish out the semester.

Not surprisingly, students and faculty members didn’t love the experience. In a survey of over 3,000 students in the U.S. and Canada by Top Hat, an education-technology company, nearly 80 percent of respondents said their online courses lacked the engagement of in-person classes. Half said online was worse than face-to-face instruction; 16 percent said it was a lot worse.

So you might expect, since there is still so much uncertainty about the pandemic, that colleges this summer would be putting most of their efforts toward creating better digital courses for the fall. But that hasn’t been the case. Instead, the prevailing strategy at most institutions is to do almost anything possible to get back to in-person classes. That’s why we’ve seen a preponderance of “return to campus” or “reopening campus” task forces.

Their plans teeter between the audacious and the absurd. Tiny Colby College aims to administer 85,000 Covid-19 tests in the fall semester at a cost of $10 million. The Community College of Baltimore County proposes to prop open all interior doors to minimize the touching of door handles. Purdue University is fundraising for plexiglass and lab masks. The clear message is that it’s easier for colleges to purchase plexiglass than redesign pedagogy.

The race to get back to campus in some form, even for a few weeks, is largely about one thing: money. If this fall is entirely online, polls have shown, families don’t think they should have to pay the on-campus price. The traditional business model for higher education is built on the in-person experience. Without it, vast pieces of institutional budgets will collapse and quite possibly the very future of all but the most prominent institutions.

You can hardly blame parents and students for balking at tuition prices when the experience in the spring was so disappointing. In place of all the time, effort, and money colleges are spending on trying to resume on-campus instruction this fall — efforts that may be in vain due to factors outside colleges’ control — they should instead be focused on improving last semester’s remote experience. They should invest in better online-learning platforms, expand instructional-design support for professors to overhaul their courses, and offer widespread training in online teaching.

Trinity Washington University, which, like other colleges, struggled this spring to shift to teaching online, has done just that. Surveys the institution conducted in March and April of faculty members and students convinced its president, Patricia McGuire, that the university had to up its online game this fall, given that classes were likely to be online again. To assist full-time faculty members and adjuncts in designing better digital courses over the summer, the university is spending $300,000 through Quality Matters, a nonprofit organization that helps individuals and institutions develop and improve their online teaching.

The fixation on getting back to campus is the type of short-term thinking that got higher education into this mess in the first place.

If other colleges started making similar efforts several months ago, they wouldn’t be scrambling right now as the pandemic rages on and threatens their plans for restarting in person. And if students and their families were confident that remote instruction in the fall would be better than the spring — that it could even be as good as in-person classes — we might see fewer demands for reduced tuition rates, lessening the pressure on colleges’ bottom lines.

The fixation on getting back to campus is the type of short-term thinking that got higher education into this mess in the first place. When the pandemic hit, few residential campuses had invested sufficient resources in their digital infrastructure. Online education was still something their graduate or adult-education programs did, or it was considered a second-rate alternative for traditional residential undergraduates. And so, at many institutions, it remains.

ADVERTISEMENT

Before the pandemic, “digital education” in face-to-face classes often meant the use of a learning-management system, and professors usually didn’t use the technology much beyond posting grades and assignments. The complaints from students in the Top Hat survey and the narrow focus by colleges on getting back to campus demonstrate that many higher-education leaders “fail to recognize what’s missing in their online experience — and that is engaged, active learning,” Mike Silagadze, Top Hat’s co-founder, told me. Most students this spring passively watched traditional lectures simply relocated online. Not enough colleges had online programs requiring student participation or involvement.

It isn’t surprising that colleges and faculty members at residential colleges would give little attention to online education. Campuses aren’t evaluated by students, parents, or rankings for their online offerings, and professors aren’t rewarded for improving their teaching online. Building a structure for online and hybrid learning is expensive. Colleges might have to give up something to do it well, and they don’t often have a taste for trade-offs. Trinity is hardly flush with cash and spent a portion of its federal Cares Act money to improve remote learning for the fall.

If you want to know if the investment is worth it, look at institutions that invested in their digital backbone over the last decade, such as Carnegie Mellon, Georgia State, and lesser-known institutions like Arkansas State and Indian River State College, in Florida. They all found the abrupt shift to remote learning easier. Georgia State was able to add new “risk factors” into their existing campus-wide electronic advising systems to keep students on track toward their degree. Indian River had already designed their courses for mobile devices, which came in handy this spring with many students juggling home life and classes. But on most campuses, the use of technology in teaching is left up to individual faculty members and is not seen as crucial to the institution.

The result is a disjointed and disappointing online experience. An improved online experience this fall — and a true digital transformation of higher education in the long run — requires the all-hands-on-deck coordination we’re seeing in how colleges are approaching the return to a physical campus. The flurry of task forces we’re seeing around reopening campus, the hundred-page contingency plans, the granular attention to detail on doorknobs, plexiglass dividers, and tracking apps — this is exactly the sort of effort institutions need to put into improving their online instruction.

Few colleges were prepared for the sudden shift to online education in the spring. Students weren’t happy with the experience, but many likely gave their institutions some benefit of the doubt because of the unprecedented circumstances. We shouldn’t expect them to be so forgiving in the fall. If colleges continue to succumb to shortsightedness and have nothing to offer next semester but another diminished online educational experience, the repercussions could be felt for years to come.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Technology Online Learning
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
selingo-jeff-white-close-crop.jpg
About the Author
Jeffrey J. Selingo
Jeffrey J. Selingo, a former editor of The Chronicle, is the author of Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions (Scribner, 2020). He is a special adviser at Arizona State University, where he is the founder of the ASU-Georgetown University Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. His next book, Dream School: Finding the College That’s Right for You, will be published by Scribner in September 2025.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Pro-Palestinian student protesters demonstrate outside Barnard College in New York on February 27, 2025, the morning after pro-Palestinian student protesters stormed a Barnard College building to protest the expulsion last month of two students who interrupted a university class on Israel. (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP) (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)
Campus Activism
A College Vows to Stop Engaging With Some Student Activists to Settle a Lawsuit Brought by Jewish Students
LeeNIHGhosting-0709
Stuck in limbo
The Scientists Who Got Ghosted by the NIH
Protesters attend a demonstration in support of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, March 10, 2025, in New York.
First-Amendment Rights
Noncitizen Professors Testify About Chilling Effect of Others’ Detentions
Photo-based illustration of a rock preciously suspended by a rope over three beakers.
Broken Promise
U.S. Policy Made America’s Research Engine the Envy of the World. One President Could End That.

From The Review

Vector illustration of a suited man with a pair of scissors for a tie and an American flag button on his lapel.
The Review | Opinion
A Damaging Endowment Tax Crosses the Finish Line
By Phillip Levine
University of Virginia President Jim Ryan keeps his emotions in check during a news conference, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022 in Charlottesville. Va. Authorities say three people have been killed and two others were wounded in a shooting at the University of Virginia and a student is in custody. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
The Review | Opinion
Jim Ryan’s Resignation Is a Warning
By Robert Zaretsky
Photo-based illustration depicting a close-up image of a mouth of a young woman with the letter A over the lips and grades in the background
The Review | Opinion
When Students Want You to Change Their Grades
By James K. Beggan

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin