Will this semester forever alter college? No, but some virtual tools will stick around – The Hechinger Report
Students don’t want total transformation, but faculty attitudes toward tech have changed
A professor at Loyola University New Orleans taught his first virtual class from his courtyard, wearing his bathrobe and sipping from a glass of wine. Lafayette College showed faculty how to make document cameras at home using cardboard and rubber bands.
Hamilton College set up drive-up Wi-Fi stations for faculty members whose connections weren’t reliable enough to let them upload material to the internet. And students in a musicology course at Virginia Tech were assigned to create TikTok videos.
The disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic has prompted cobbled-together responses ranging from the absurd to the ingenious at colleges and universities struggling to continue teaching even as their students have receded into diminutive images, in dire need of haircuts, on videoconference checkerboards.
But while all of this is widely being referred to as online higher education, most of it isn’t. And as for predictions that it will trigger a permanent exodus from brick-and-mortar campuses to virtual ones, all indications – so far – are that it probably won’t.