Whats going to happen to Higher Education in the middle of a pandemic universities are scrambling to get their lectures online as coronavirus lockdowns lock out students but what will that do to the quality of education this is inside story. Hello welcome to the program. But coronavirus pandemic is disrupting Higher Education worldwide lockdowns of closed university and College Campuses classes have moved online one of the worlds most prestigious universities cambridge in england is making all actors on while until next year but can virtual classes provide the same learning experience and should students continue to pay higher tuition fees so they can set their exams. Reports. Can Read University has experienced plagues wars and social upheavals over the past 800 years the coronavirus is the latest challenge social distancing rules mean students and teachers havent been on campus since the start of the pandemic so University Staff are making tough choices all mass lectures so really big lectures involving a lot of students will not happen face to face will be put online this could continue until the end of the 2021 Academic Year but small Group Tutorials can still be held as long as students and teachers follow social distancing measures staff say theyll try to offer a full learning experience with as little disruption as possible no its not going to feel like an online course because there will be all this other education around it and frankly when we are in a lucky position in terms of what education. A lot of that education is based on Small Group Teaching and and the small groups are really small i mean sometimes its one on one or groups of 2 or 3 we can manage that. But while lectures can go online relatively easily students studying degrees such as in science and medicine are missing out on practical class time and students dont have the opportunity to socialize its a radical change to the Campus Experience i think is it better to keep everyone safe next year will be like you have your 4 experience than having to worry about getting like a distance from other people so i think youll be better in the long run universities are also losing a huge source of revenue foreign students who often pay much higher tuition fees than locals the global Tertiary Education sector is estimated to be worth 2. 00 trillion dollars but travel Restrictions MeanMany International students cant fly back to class institutions in the u. K. And australia are asking their governments for billions of dollars to fill the funding gap the pandemic is forcing universities to learn a tough lesson in survival due on the silver for inside story. Lets bring in our guests in the u. S. City of boston we have geoffrey segun a senior lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy school is also the author of the right thing conscience profit and personal responsibility in todays business in indias capital new delhi we have an earwig student at Lady Shriram College at the university of delhi and part of its Students Union she started a petition to have a reevaluation of exam papers at college and from Portland Oregon in the United States ryan carson an Online Learning specialist and founder of the online tech school treehouse welcome to you all geoffrey ill begin with you if i may if you were offered a place to start the university this year would you go for it in the current circumstances. It depends i mean it depends on what how the said it would be obviously we couldnt right now with what we know we couldnt have classes like we had them last year in prison and theyre too close to 200. 00 to too much proximity to one another so the conditions would have to change. But i wouldnt necessarily refuse to return but would that make you nervous youd want to be part of a class is wouldnt you thats the problem you would face a totally different experience at the university this time around well we went for the 2nd half of the space mystery went totally out of line and it wasnt optimal to do that but it was a safe experience and the students received a quality education by going online it was the way that we were able to provide the same education ideally would i rather be back on campus certainly but id rather the primary goal should be that we keep students and faculty and staff safe and here youve already started your University Education but if you were a new student beginning looking to start in september october would you take up the offer or try and put it trying to figure it. I would definitely try. That with Online Education or lack of good or bad the question of accessibility and to provide the best the life after be on jani and the fact that you can blind down but i have to listen to that have questions and that people that go with it if they the place is just you know im probably online and look at it but i would definitely that with ryan even you benefited from a University Education some years ago perhaps but would you go this time around in the current circumstances. I would strongly recommend that students defer for a year and focus on affordable Online Learning schools that were really good at Teaching Online and had a lot of experience doing that what why would you make them defer whats what would put you off from going this time round. So i started to ask because i got a Computer Science degree and i realized that jobs werent necessarily connected to the curriculum that i was taught and the price was very high so weve been doing this for 10 years who taught 650000 people and what weve learned is that Online Learning is not the same as in person so you need a school that is Online Learning 1st and its very very different and its very hard to do jeffrey thats the problem isnt it universities are not set up to do effective Online Learning its been a bit of a scramble to go online save what wobbly video connections lectures at the other end its not engaging is it well its that hes absolutely right there is a big difference between teaching in person Teaching Online and to teach online well you really need to think the course differently just cant pick up the course and do it its not so much because of the connections its more that good online courses and you can speak to this more more than i could good online courses arent just a matter of taking what you did in the classroom and putting that on the screen its thinking of what you can do asynchronously how you can help students connect online so the possibility is there to do it well on line but it does take planning and at least many universities in the United States have been trying to plan for that for the fall to have the option of either going online or in person so theres no theres no world in which it anybody thinks that its just a simple matter of translating and a new person version to an online version it does take a lot of work to do it well and we did scramble to do it quickly because the pandemic you know came upon us so we basically had a week to plan to have it had to transform our in person classes to an online experience and after a few hiccups it went pretty well and you know what were the challenges you a faced with when suddenly faced with a lockdown in delhi one of the main problems hes hot. So that a lot of girls are since all of us come from body that was background its a difficult for you know us if youre the one that everybody has a say in kind of this and just in the next connected with the all the the weight of the deal the so i say that im just a can do things and by mike i mean especially for anyone people who have special needs its very difficult for them to have or get access to online classes and the fact that we assume that all the fuss as living in houses that you can 2nd is women against asas but thats not the case and just the fact that getting access to these nonces and also having like of the age of the thing on like the ones that fall pregnant thats and you need a sick was not on up with us those are also you know i need to take online stuff the stuff we run is a really important. Point for manja isnt it doesnt increase the got between the haves and the have nots between those who have a spare room between those who have a good wife connection and those that dont going online is going to increase these despises isnt it. It is thats a very real concern however if we have if we can reduce the barrier on the cost level we actually increase access quite a bit so Online Learning is more affordable because its more affordable to deliver and so thats something the east that is increasing that accessibility but shes absolutely right what about folks that are hearing impaired they need closed captioning on all those videos thats very important weve been focusing on that for a long time i think what schools need to understand is to do Online Learning effect of the you have to use a flipped classroom model and you have to use competency based learning and you have to deliver that flip flip path classroom through 5 to 7 minute videos that are interspersed with engaging in activities for the students to move forward you have to change the way projects are graded you have to add chat rooms and support its a completely different model it took us 10 years to figure this out. I just think that believing that you can get same education because your university is suddenly going online unfortunately is not true and im not anti College College and universities are important but students should get what theyre paying for and just for those of us news to the idea of Online Learning what is a flipped classroom of understand what that is. Flip classroom is where doing most of the instruction by video that you watch alone you can rewind it you can fast forward it you can posit and then the engagement and and the instruction from real folks happens over video so youre learning through short videos by yourself and then youre doing chatting with other students in a chat room in your teachers verses sitting in a classroom where your teacher is teaching live it really needs to be flipped to video that you can possibly wind and fast forward and then turn in your assignments and engage with your students that way. Jeffrey ryan mentioned that it took them 10 years to try and refine the way they taught and in that gap the haves and the have nots the gap between the haves and the have nots will widen wonted there are those who just dont have the space to study as well as those who have got a spare room those have a good Internet Connection that sort of thing theres a big problem that has none. That is a real problem that is the real issue i think the the the the the pressure is there to make sure that people have access both through a laptop and have a steady connection i think one of the things with the flipped classroom is exactly right and even in person colleges have been doing that weve been experimenting with that for many years as well where we have students doing the work on the outside of the class so we actually do the discussion inside the bus so there is that thats a really good model to use i think one of the things though that ends up happening. The had the access to connectivity is really important one of the things that potentially does happen is i know that when we did this and i dont know that this is possible for everybody to do but the ability for students to connect with their professors actually increased we were a lot down as well at our at our houses and wherever we were and we increased our office hours so there were the abilities to have one on ones with the professors more extensively than there might have been in person where there are there are fewer meetings to go to there of were actually there and we realize that the dedication to the student becomes more important so i know that my access to students was increased during the 2nd half of the spring semester. And its just easy to connect and i think ryan can probably speak to that i dont know how they do it a treehouse but since a lot of it is asynchronous the way theyre designing it which makes sense the connectivity to the professor real time becomes really important then we try to increase that incredibly spending to particular for the students who are the have nots and students were connecting not just by computer theyre connected with their i phones with their droids so whatever connection worked works for them and we try to make that we try to sort of. Decrease those gaps as much as possible some of that is just infrastructure or students have to have there has to be access to life by connections in their houses i mean we also have seen in our stories about professors are also trying to teach in houses where there are kids in the background and they have lives and challenges as well so it is it is an ongoing pressure for all sides anya the university of delhi have youll have you been able to get better access to professors as a consequence of this if they manage to in 2 to work around the lockdown whats happened. I mean weve always had that he would act that the only thing it that you would want to act the one you have or dont and would only have if you have ak the theory is although the next job or. The boom or the but a need one have access to internet all week and then you dont have on those will be doing house of course you dont have time to connect to get the best and also be that you know although i do understand that both of them they were delighted and they were always active it although that was some kind of pressure on the always be on call to always be on that all of the what that whatever whatever those who made up that is being you. Reckon that more of a gap between up and. If this online on anything theyll call one and not all of that easy that is so useful has it been that you dont want to them or do you even have a go by how the one how delving or having that all of them found over the intervening to then but to me the has been the have no its the bit of new and people who have more modern than that ryan you mention this 10 year period it took fee to refine what you do major academic institutions are going to have to move a hell of a lot quicker than that 1. 00 of the main mistakes they make when they try and go online what have you learnt. Weve learned its very important to record your video lessons and 5 to 10 minute sections and completely flip the classroom weve learned that you need to use tools like slack for chatting to engage with your students and become available you can also then leverage students to help other students a lot of the support that happens at tree houses student to student in slack where theyre actually helping each other which scales the support it means people get responses faster you really you really need to transition from a 1. 00 to 1. 00 model to a one to many thats asynchronous that thats flipped classroom thats based on competency based learning weve spent 60000000. 00 building our platform and its hard and i think were in a tight spot where universities are struggling and its not their fault this was created by the pandemic but students need to evaluate the value theyre getting for their education which is why i said to for right now just learn online while we go through this and then pick things back up when your university is back in person jeffery academic institutions in europe the United States australia modeled heavily reliant on foreign students particularly also as their own demographic numbers drop they created a problem for themselves theyre going to going to have how are they going to adjust to the fact the foreign students might not turn up next year. You know there is some talk there is the talk about various models that going on right now not everybody has decided what theyre doing nobody really knows what its going to look like in the fall of those some universities are really made a decision so theres it is theres a possibility of being in person in the fall theres a possibility of being online in the fall and then there is the distinct possibility that because of that challenge of of pieces and travel that there will be some sort of hybrid. Where we will actually be trying to teach people both online and in person at the same time which is privet presents a whole new set of challenges which are not insurmountable but as ryan points out this is not easy so i think it may very well be that we have some students who are in person in the fall and some who are still online and were figuring out a way to do a hybrid model which is doable i mean ideally everybody would be back and everybody would say be safe and that would be fine but but were trying to prepare for all options as they come about and that happened actually a little bit as we were shifting after spring break this year which was about mid march where the i did have one class read about 9 students on the screen and the rest of the class in the room and it does you know it presents an interesting challenge of being tethered to a keyboard when youre in the classroom but its doable and in university of delhi is a very Prestigious Institution can you sense than in perhaps that many Indian Students might be less tempted to scramble to go abroad to the u. S. To to your up to australia and prefer to find an education at home. So i i mean everybodys basically i was im also probably moscow student and im ok even without a flag because thats when with on so doing you see that i dont want to be sick i can choose the anyway like oh if you mention that you should see so students who are coming to love though if my child on the things that i know cause so a lot of fuss lack of effort i dont were going to get the is killing me or ill be going to joining. Because like i say online not anything of a distant concept and then its quite an explosion in any of a concept but i would be to have equal access any to think that the high miles of me and if you think that i solutions want all its all just the city and is just going thing that is as effective as in boston education so i think most of us and as far as i know the students of already saw that deafening that english and seems seems like a good its on so if anything and if im to make people want to be going outside i can connect. Run the was a lot of tool 10 years or more ago excitement at the prospect of Online Education revolutionizing education but it never really took off or did it or has the kick you need to think from this far. Sadly this is what i think we all needed to realize how affordable and effective Online Learning can be if its done online native so weve never taught in person weve always been online for a decade and i think thats why weve gotten good at it so i think were going to see an explosion of online 1st schools where that is the model and it is more effective and more accessible if its done that way im excited about that i think more people are going to get access to high paying jobs theyre going to have less student debt theyre going to learn faster these are all actually good things and its sad and brutal that weve had to go through a pandemic to realize that but i think actually were going to come out of this with less student debt more education more access ability more jobs. Jeffrey ryan sees a positive future that from from Online Learning but at the moment youve got students whove paid thousands and thousands of dollars for a particular type of education for one on one access the campus facilities that are not going to get any of that what do you say to them how do you compensate them with the campus facilities obviously if theyre physically not here theyre not to get there but the one on one i think its. Sort of urge on you tube and other students to remember that thats what they pay us for that one on one access so when students contact me and they were reaching out to me in the 2nd half of the semester i did this when in person as well but it its our job this is this is our job is that is to do that one on one teaching and to do all that we that can be facilitated online in person use of the libraries or use of the social events obviously if theyre not on campus they can do that one of the things thats been interesting for me at least is that. Moving over to use a variety of different technological tools to to sort of bridge the class and figuring out how to do that and how to break apart and restructure the class or reach tunes and teach reach the course objectives and use that as the primary goal some of that has actually been fun and so it is something i find myself saying which is unfortunate is that if it werent for the pandemic this would actually be a fun there that is enjoyable to try to teach in a different way and to help people learn in a different way and reach the same course objectives but the access to the professors really shouldnt change and the technology. Because many of us who are doing it a good portion of our classes in real time still not as much as we would have if we were in physical place that that access to professors shooting increased rather than decreased because the technology shouldnt make that hard to do i think its just a matter of getting that message across to students clear and some of that is sort of could be a cultural difference or a sense of its not my right to contact the professor they should just remove that from any thinking because thats our job our job is to provide a strong education to our students interest the course objectives and any student who wants access to their professor should be able to get it and what sort of challenges the lockdown had on your education do you think how have you felt affected by it by whats happened. So i think that is the connector will in all of that i mentioned has so that so much on so if anything about whats going to happen even what if i missed so much of a 2nd that neither of us even invited on the gang of of i though and often have on that exams all whether thats going to be some of them will the mocking which again online exams that exchange exclusion of the nation in nature especially for students across the that you know wussy because we come from a guy with background and the fact that thats what my confessional in you would do you know that offended me going of and wish they expected that i guess anguish expected as i finally found any just if a good domenic between that meeting and you know even helping in the house or go with them one thing that i do agree with although is that if you wish an feel of the economy he should then be that because the fact that they accessible and most of them must in seeking that justice i dont mean that person you can say to women who will a library should not be focused you dont have access to that anymore and especially for students if anybody disagrees with papers he seems to lead the access and all of that but the act of this is a bit of a faceless something that they have and access and i just i think its just the old usman communing with who supposed to study you supposed to find you gone to if you were supposed to see that they were all going to laugh and mock us and all of that youre supposed to do it all in this environment so you know i dont miss that thing out and having one to one conversations or walking down you know with even if id been seeing thing in the new molesting sitting in front of us. In front of a spinning fans like of the governor wallace now. Or ok well unfortunately folks were out of time but thank you very much for your insights thanks to geoffrey settle in to our new wig and to ryan carson and thank you too for watching you can see the program again any time by visiting our website aljazeera dot com and for further discussion go to our Facebook Page at facebook dot com forward slash a. J. Inside story you can also join the conversation on twitter we are at a. J. Inside story and im at 0 from a burning thread and the whole scene here by foot. The latest news as it breaks the mine sits within a valley surrounded by bush land and most of the operations have been about 500 inmates has been able to surface with detailed coverage of the Malaysian Navy recently prevented a boat carrying around 200 rating of refugees from landing from around the world government leaders are accusing their opponents of trying to topple that by traveling with financial stability. 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