Thoughts on COVID-19 and the future of teaching

Amidst the doom and gloom around coronavirus, I invite you to entertain some potential silver linings with me.

With universities transitioning all courses online, teaching strategies likely won’t return to “normal” once we recover from the pandemic. But might they actually get better?

I’m preparing to TA for a now-online course next quarter, and I’ve discussed the following topics with a handful of my professors:

On teaching approaches:

• Flipped classroom to teaching seem promising, but they lack widespread experimentation and support. Will the approach be given a foothold in the coming months?

On online resources:

• STEM courses often underutilize required-reading and other external resources, meaning lectures are dominated by information sharing instead of critical thinking. Will courses learn to value these resources as instructional tools, and rely on the instructor as an expert rather than a source of general information?

On human interaction:

• COVID-19’s reign will deny us the level of human interaction we’re used to, and deny us the power of face-to-face interaction (and the associated non-verbals) in effective communication. Will the temporary suppression encourage us to better appreciate and embrace in-person interaction once we recover?

On technological adoption:

• Technological advancements haven’t effectively worked their way into the education system yet, but teaching and technology will be forced to intertwine next quarter. Will this spur on the adoption of technologies that help students with disabilities, and encourage more innovation in the field of education-technology?

Will we learn from our brief online trial, and continue to utilize some of the new teaching techniques once we recover? The universities themselves have a large role in determining this.

If we are to learn from our experiences, universities must: give their instructional staff the proper training and resources to prepare for online teaching; effectively differentiate themselves from existing online education platforms by facilitating interaction between students and faculty; and collect the data necessary to examine the effectiveness of novel teaching approaches.

I think we have an interesting future ahead of us pertaining to education practices in the wake of COVID-19… what do you think?