Commonly, universities offer courses on campus. Students can attend workshops and lectures. They can visit student advisors and other supporting services and there are many study spaces among campus. In my opinion, traditional higher education is expensive and outdated. There was almost no interaction during the lectures and only a few things were done online. Sometimes lectures were recorded and posted online afterwards, and some courses offered bonus exams online. Most of the programs were physically taught at university. In 2009 Christensen already stated that “Higher education’s prevailing business model is a mismatch with the current educational needs of our population”. Since COVID-19, the education industry has completely changed. Nobody was allowed to visit the campus and all the workshops, lectures and supporting services switched to online. Students and staff are currently working from home with Zoom, Coursera, MOOCs and other online programs.
These disruptive educational platforms accelerated due to COVID-19. Many online programs are only allowed to hand out certificates, but now it is possible to graduate on a university degree from behind a computer (Shulz, n.d.). A disruptor in the education industry is, for instance, MOOC, which grew to more than seven million users with 145 partners in six years (Shulz, n.d.). Since traditional universities are being disrupted by online platforms, more people got access to higher education. For some young people, studying was too expensive, but as it is not mandatory anymore to physically visit the campus, students do not have housing costs or travel costs. Besides, it also enables students to learn at their own pace (Shulz, n.d.). Online learning platforms also offer cheaper, modular education. Another advantage of the transition to online learning is that it contributes to our interconnected world (Fischetti, 2019). Students can go anywhere, spreading knowledge all over the world. In my opinion, the education industry should invest in creating online education with the possibility to physically attend lectures and workshops. In this manner, studying will be cheaper, with the consequence that less wealthy people can also follow higher education and students who live close to university can still visit campus to come together with their fellow students.
References:
Christensen, C. (n.d.). How to Manage the Disruption of Higher Education? Harvard Business School. Retrieved on September 14, 2020, from http://forum.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FF10ManagDisruption.pdf
Fischetti, J. (2019, June 18). The three things universities must do to survive disruption. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-three-things-universities-must-do-to-survive-disruption-117970
Shulz, L. (n.d.). Digital disruption: are universities keeping up? Deakin University. Retrieved on September 14, 2020, from https://this.deakin.edu.au/study/digital-disruption-are-universities-keeping-up
Hi Anouck,
you state some great advantages of online education! I definitely agree with you that it is important to make higher education accessible to everyone. However, how are universities going to distinguish between students only following online education and students physically attending lectures and workshops with regards to tuition fees? Also, I believe people who only follow online education will fall behind with their social skills on professional level, so I doubt we can value their accomplishments as high as those physically attending education.