This question of access was among the key themes of a webinar led by Duncan last week on the topics and trends facing higher education, featured Thursday as part of the virtual Educause Annual Conference. The panel touched on increased popularity of accelerated vocational training in favor of traditional degree programs, efforts to narrow the digital divide during COVID-19 and new approaches to instruction that deviate from traditional in-person learning, among other topics.
Duncan said that for decades, U.S. higher ed institutions have had to answer the question of how to “fix" education rather than increasing access to it. He said the pandemic forced many to address the latter more often, amid efforts to increase Internet access on the institutional, local, state and federal levels during COVID-19 for remote learning.
“I think [we’ve] obviously seen tremendous innovation and adaptation over the past couple years. It's been extraordinary, and there are places that are continuing to do an amazing job of educating first-generation college goers, English language learners and folks who weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouth,” he said. “For me, the question is not ‘broken or not broken.’ I don't think it's broken. It's [about asking], ‘How do we continue to make the chance not just to go to college, but to graduate, the norm for folks across the country?'
“If we’re going to try to close these gaps between the haves and the have-nots, and if we're going to try and equalize not just educational but economic opportunity, the challenge for all of us is how we start to educate exponentially more young people,” he said. “It’s not just about access. For me, it's always about completion.”
Screenshot by Brandon Paykamian
“One of the things we learned from the pandemic was that everything doesn't have to be — in fact, can't be — brick and mortar,” he said. “The ‘nontraditional’ has become the norm … That's the challenge.”
Duncan said institutions now see online learning less as a necessity but as an opportunity to expand access to high-quality courses and lessons. For instance, he said, a school or university now considers hiring instructors for online learning who would otherwise be unavailable because of distance, among other benefits that come with digitization in education.
“The idea historically, whether it was K-12 [or] higher ed, was that your learning was bound by being in a physical building Monday through Friday, X number of hours per day,” he said. “Now, we can learn anything we want anytime, anywhere 24/7.”
Duncan said that another opportunity often framed as a challenge involves the increased popularity of accelerated learning programs in favor of traditional degree paths, which some view as a contributing factor in recent enrollment declines at U.S. universities across the board.
Rather than competing with the emerging model, he said some universities have already begun to add these training courses, such as coding boot camp programs, to their course catalogs.
“We just want to give them as many high-quality options as we can, and let them figure out for themselves, their current family situation and work situation, what the best option is for them,” he said, noting that student performance data for tracking progress has been an important aspect of effective vocational training in other countries.
However, Duncan said, the ability to fully embrace ed-tech-driven innovation and new approaches to instruction still depends on closing the digital divide, even after recent efforts to expand access to devices and Internet needed for remote learning.
“It's just got to be a fundamental given — not a privilege, but a right — in our country,” he said. “We’re not all the way there yet.”
