Dec
31
It is now over two years since the COVID-19 pandemic first significantly affected the functions of higher education and the consequences of the impact cannot be under-estimated. Many effects were budgetary, including negative enrollment growth, but probably most important to academic affairs in the long run was the changes implemented in the way we do our business as faculty and academic administration. The pandemic resulted in rapid change, but as several authors have noted, primarily the pandemic was speeding up changes in education that were already in progress[1]. In 2020 we went from traditional “university speed” to Star Wars hyper-drive speed, but along the path we had already chosen.
The challenges we currently face getting back to a “normal” (thanks to vaccines and other immunity enhancers), are working with student impacts (including the challenges of new students whose instruction while in high school or community college was negatively impacted) and finding the technology mix that is appropriate. We seem to be in a continuous transition state. While in 2020, we were mainly responding without much time for reflection, we now need to perform assessments of the changes we made. We need to assure that modifications that were improvements are not. It is only through this assessment that our picture of the academy of the future will be realized.
Therefore, we will need to look at changes that were made in: