policy & reform
campusreview.com.au
Pauses,
pivots and
possibilities
Navigating higher education
post-pandemic.
By Marcia Devlin
Options to address the massive
coronavirus-related hits to
university revenue are being
considered and implemented.
Many universities had large capital
projects underway and infrastructure plans
in development when the virus hit. One
option for budget management that has
appeared frequently in university plans
is the reduction, delay or deferment of
capital/infrastructure expenditure. This is
certainly preferable to some of the other
options being considered.
REMOTE PIVOTS
Meanwhile, in this context of uncertainty,
universities have pivoted to online and
other remote forms of learning very
quickly, and this is at least part of the new
normal for universities for the short to
medium term.
Most higher education can be offered
remotely and done so successfully, if not
easily. Most higher education learning is
theory-based and can be well provisioned
at a distance. That said, all universities are
also grappling with the challenges of what
cannot be so easily provisioned remotely.
Lab-based, practical, placement and some
music and art-based subjects are more
difficult to teach, learn and assess remotely.
Any learning that requires specialist
equipment found only on campus appears
difficult to manage well from a distance.
However, human ingenuity, creativity
and the fact that necessity is the mother
of invention mean that we are likely to see
effective approaches to these challenges
emerge quickly.
While some alternatives will be less than
perfect, there is also the possibility that the
creative alternatives will be better than ‘the
old way’. Closed book, timed, invigilated,
written exams that measure the recall of
facts that will soon be outdated – we’re
looking at you.
CLICKS vs BRICKS
The pause in capital/infrastructure spend
and the apparently successful pivot to
remote learning together lead naturally
to questions about the future of learning,
including location and mode.
The decisions about these matters will
fall to those funding and determining
policy for higher education in government,
as well as to the executives and council
members who lead universities.
Hopefully, both will be informed by
prospective and current student and other
stakeholder views.
HEREIN LIES A RISK
Most policymakers, politicians, university
executive and university council members,
including myself, were educated last
century. For many of us, the initial
degree was a time of relatively blissful,
unencumbered youth, defined by elite
intellectual pursuit and social interaction, all
undertaken face-to-face and all undertaken
in and around buildings.
The risk is that there may be a tendency
for us oldies to don rose-coloured lenses
and conjure up sentimental memories, to
create a view of the past that may not be
accurate or helpful to the future.
It is easy to forget that, for example, the
late 20th century was a time of higher
levels of sexism, racism, homophobia and
unreported sexual assault, to name just a
few issues, than is the case today, but we
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