What next for ‘online’ and ‘learning’ in HE after Coronavirus?

You could argue that Universities were practicing social distancing long before Coronavirus came along. With the pressures of reducing student numbers due to the population dip, increased pension costs, and the fixed tuition fee, the fiscal squeeze has meant Universities have had a laser focus on saving money. One of these ways has been to ‘harmonise’ support services taking administration out of Schools and into hubs of some description. This disrupts a key support element for students – the admin team who get to know them and are there to help and support them, many going above and beyond the call of duty.

Alongside this HE was moving online with elements that can be done more efficiently and effectively using technology, porting across processes like extenuating circumstances requests. This is fine and sensible as long as it is executed with the user experience at the heart of it as it means students have less and less contact with any staff. There is a need to ensure that the electronic systems they are accessing still have the ‘human touch’ and are not simply a paper form replicated online.

Now, with COVID-19, Universities have had to move teaching and support online which has created many challenges covered elsewhere on how to deliver the learning experience online. Looking forward this creates the potential that some HE institutes may perceive some low hanging fruit in terms of further efficiencies and savings going forward if some of this new online delivery can be made to stick for standard UG/PG degrees as and when normal service is resumed. It also opens the opportunity to access other markets through distance learning which can be a lucrative market, which again will be hard to resist.

However successful the current move to distance provision is, rolling this forward, the psychology will be very different from when everyone is ‘in it together’ against a common enemy struggling to work through a crisis, and when it is then ‘business as usual’. It is probably stating the obvious, but it is worth emphasising that students will be expecting to have a full service akin to being fully to face to face. If modules are worked into curricula on the back of the current situation then they will need to be carefully thought through so that they can be delivered properly and effectively as distance learning modules.

If the HE landscape does move to more online provision because of the advantages it brings then the entire technological ecosystem becomes even more important so students do not find themselves studying piecemeal elements of DL and being kept more at ‘arms-length’ from the University at large. this could lead to greater issues of isolation, uncertainty and so more anxiety.

There are a lot of simple things that can be done to try and ensure an effective and supportive online environment:

• Taking care of the language used – it has to have absolute clarity whilst also being inclusive and caring.
• Linking to relevant support clearly on the page (and doing this consistently across resources)
• What other information/systems might be relevant to a student in the current context – for instance, context-specific assessments regs (rather than link to a long and probably technical article that the student will not be in the right frame of mind to deal with)
• Adding real human touch by being able to chat synchronously online with someone if help is needed.
• Maybe images of the people that are on the other end of the process if relevant so at least it is obvious it isn’t just a computer.
• The colours and fonts used – which will give Uni Marketing departments paroxysms about being off-brand, but some things are more important!
• Simple, almost inconsequential ‘nudges’…like a background image.
• Information clarity (worth mentioning twice 🙂 )

Just taking the time to think through the user experience shows that care has, and is, being taken for students. Being empathetic will go a long way to really supporting the students. This has to be put in place at the same time as the development of distance learning, it cannot be an afterthought in response to student issues.

Like most things the theory is simple but it takes commitment and tenacity to embed long term cultural changes that might be required for this, but if Universities take even more care over their online systems then at least that is a small positive step we can take forward from the current crisis.