4. Allow students to adjust the timing and format of education to fit other priorities in their lives. Colleges, universities, and other education providers should consider how to offer programming at various times and through multiple means of delivery such as online, mobile, and blended, and through competency-based education models.
5. Provide students with affordable access to the high-quality resources they need to be successful and to empower them to become curators of their own learning. Institutions should ensure that students have immediate access to affordable, up-to-date learning materials that are based on current learning research and are accessible to all students. Institutions should encourage practices that support student agency to find, evaluate, and use additional learning resources that are relevant to their needs and that will persist beyond a single course.
6. Enable advisors to help students progress through changing needs and circumstances. Coaches, advisors, and mentors should leverage robust data to provide students with the guidance to succeed through times of transition. This support may include proactive advising and outreach by phone, text, and email. Actionable data should also be made available directly to students through analytics dashboards.
7. Help institutions identify and provide timely and targeted assistance to students. Instructors and advisors should have appropriate access to course-specific learning analytics data that inform early and individualized interventions to help students connect with additional academic and social support they may need to succeed.
8. Allow students to build meaningful education pathways incrementally. Institutions and education providers should offer stackable and transferrable credits to accommodate students who need to move seamlessly in and out of their institutions, and between systems of education, to efficiently accommodate their learning and life goals.
9. Allow students to document their learning in ways that can be applied to further education or meaningful work. Institutions and education providers should leverage technology to allow students to accurately demonstrate a variety of learning outcomes and should provide transparent, portable credentials that are articulated and recognized across traditional or nontraditional systems.
10. Create a network of learning that supports students as creators and entrepreneurs, and agents of their own learning. Empower students to drive their own continuous learning through a digital infrastructure that enables everywhere, all-the-time learning. These will support the variety of learning and credentialing pathways that students pursue throughout the stages of their lives, and need to be flexible to the learner’s needs, interests, and goals, and responsive to constraints around schedule, employment, financial means, and other life circumstances.5
Lessons learned through the COVID-19 pandemic reveal that not only were these recommendations valid in 2015 but remain so today. Moreover, general change needs to involve all members of higher education.
Boards
Boards of trustees are the agents for directing colleges or universities toward the achievement of their mission, and one of their primary responsibilities is fiduciary. Basic fiduciary duties include caring for and being loyal to the institution, including overseeing management, finances, and quality; setting strategic direction; building community relationships; establishing ethical standards, values, and compliance; and selecting a CEO and monitoring his or her progress. According to the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB), while the law explicates fiduciary duties in some circumstances, for their application it typically looks to board members’ sound judgment guided by integrity, observation,
experience, insight, and institutional policy.6
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