Plexiglass Won’t Save Us

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.

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.

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.