Online university will be rewarding
Kevin Kee believes the vibrancy of life on campus will be found digitally, too.
Thousands of recent high school graduates, having spent spring learning remotely, then graduating from their living rooms, are asking the same questions: Should I defer the coming academic year, and come back when times are better? If I go, what will university be like?
Each Canadian university is making its own announcement, but taken together the message is similar: Campus will be open, but given current physical distancing requirements, many if not most classes will be online. Social life will be different. On-campus pubs and restaurants, music and arts shows face the same outlook as those off-campus: limited in size, duration and proximity. A lot of what students do will be organized and done online, with creative uses of social media.
In short, after an unexpected end to high school, the first-year university experience will also not be typical. Weighing the pros and cons of deferral is time well spent.
Parents and students need to think about health concerns, financial considerations and whether an individual’s learning style is suited to the particular challenges of distance learning.
But the biggest concern of many is the quality of the learning experience — based on memories of the emergency pivot from in-person to online last spring.
I come at this question from several perspectives. I am a university professor and academic leader — Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the research-intensive and student-focused University of Ottawa. My wife is Head of School at Lakefield College School, which prides itself on preparing students for university and adult life. We are also parents of two university students, and uncle and aunt to two 2020 high-school graduates.
We want our students — our children, close family and those we have come to care about over time as their professors and advisers — to become masters of their academic universe through the best of learning experiences.
Can students do that in the university world that awaits in September? After months of research, planning and adjustment, the conclusion in everyday work and family conversations is a resounding yes.
There is no place more vibrant, more alive than a university campus, and the good news is that vibrancy is not going away. We are applying that same creativity and deep thinking to online teaching based on decades of research and experience.
If done well, the digital classroom experience can help students learn in new and compelling ways. In the process, students can hone their skills of resilience, self-efficacy and, of course, digital literacy.
No longer are we limited by the size and availability of a classroom; students who might not have been able to take a course can now access it, and if the subject lends itself to intensive focus, four months can now be concentrated into four weeks.
Digital tools also provide new possibilities for collaboration among professors who can pool their complementary forms of expertise. Co-operation across disciplinary boundaries is enabling universities to teach “wicked problem” courses on topics such as Human Rights and Human Wrongs, Environmental Change and our Future Planet, or Health Communication in a COVID-19 World.
And this attracts partners in the government, for-profit and not-for-profit sectors, who want to work with bright and creative young people to solve real-world problems. What they need are apprentice-researchers who are internet-savvy, socially connected and passionate about the future — the students of today.
Over the past few months, we have witnessed profound and important social change; the pandemic and Black
Lives Matter movement are creating a societal reset. Whether we are correcting long-standing structural inequities (informed by the social sciences, arts and law); creating new business models for a changing economy (in business); developing new platforms to connect with one another (in computer science engineering); or searching for treatments and cures for disease (in the sciences); universities and their students will be key to setting the new course for our society.
This will happen in class, and in the social and cultural life that is created when we gather young people together in a physical or online space. My kids, and my niece and nephew, will be part of it, on their campuses this fall.
The next few months are going to be challenging, of course. But students can draw on their unique perspectives, and the resilience they have cultivated since March. How the future unfolds is exactly why society needs recent graduates to be a part of what happens next.