Will the coronavirus make online educatioan go viral ?

The sudden closure of university campuses across China and elsewhere

has necessitated the virtual delivery of vast numbers of courses. And while there
have been inevitable teething problems, observers are wondering whether the
future might just have become the present. Joyce Lau reports.

March 12, 2020

By Joyce Lau, Bin Yang and Rudrani Dasgupta

Twitter : @JoyceLauNews

Sources : CDC/Alissa Eckert/Getty/istock montage

When Times Higher Education surveyed leaders of prominent global universities

in 2018, the 200 respondents – from 45 countries across six continents – were
emphatic on one point : online higher education would never match the real thing.

Although 63 percent expected established, prestigious universities to be offering

full degrees online by 2030, only 24 percent thought that the electronic versions
would be more popular than traditional campus based degrees (“ How will
technology reshape the university by 2030”, Features 27 September 2018).

Lino Guzella, president of ETH Zurich, asserted that “meeting people, interacting
with peers, students and supervisors – in short, a real university environment – is
the key to deep understanding”.

An Australia vice – chancellor said that “face-to-face interaction will never be

matched in quality by other modes of communication”- even in current “fads
temporarily appear to be tilting the balance towards non – human interaction”.

Jane Gatewood, vice – provost for global engagement at the University of

Rochester in New York state, likened the difference between visiting a new place
and merely”watching a video”of it.

And Yang Hai Wen, vice – president of Southern Medical University in

Guangzhou, China, said that online educational would”(create) more unhealthy
graduates and create more frustations in interpersonal communication”.

Chinese social media is currently filled with aecdotes of such frustrations with
online education. Students recount having to rush out of toilets to answer
professors’ calls or turn off their video feeds to block out relatives yelling or
playing mah- jong in the background. One group of students at the Chinese
University of Hongkong all changed heir usernames to “NO SOUND” after a
hapless professor continued to lecture with his microphone turned off.

Then again, such teething problems are only to be expected given the breakneck
speed at which universities in China have been forced to move all of their
teaching online – precisely to preserve the health of their students – in the midst
of the coronavirus outbreak that has paralysed the region. The world’s largest
higher education system has been trust into an e learning experiment of
unprecedented scale and scope, as university medical staff scramble to address an
epidemic that, by early March, had infected in excess of 100,000 patients and
killed about 4,000.

All students in mainland China and Hongkong – from kindergarteners to doctoral

candidates-were asked to stay home and pursue rheir education online after the
Lunar New Year break ended in late January. At the tertiary level, this affects 30
million laerners at 3,000 institusions, many of which have responded by rushing
to develop and launch mandatory online classes to fill a void that may endure for
the rest of the academic year in the most severely affected areas.

Nor is it only Chinese students that are affected. Many of the half – million
international students enrolled at universities in mainland China and Hong Kong
have had to log in from their home countries to continue their courses.
Meanwhile, Australia is also seeking online solutions for the estimated 100,000
Chinese international students who went home for the Lunar New Year and were
then prevented by Australia’s China travel ban from returning to campus. The
issues is particulary fraught in Australia given that the 2020-21 academic year has
already begun but, if the epidemic endures, the same issues could affect other
nations with large Chinese cohorts, such as the UK and Canada.

Universities in other Covid – 19 hotspots, such as Italy, Iran, and Singapore has
replaced in – person teaching with online alternatives for the time being. But how
realistic is it to suddenly shift large amounts of teaching online ? Are the
university leaders surveyed by THE right to assume that students will see the
virtual student experience as a poor substitude for the real thing? Or might it be
that nline higher education becomes the new normal far earlier and to a far greater
extent than any experts were previously predicting?
Asian universities were initially slow to embrace online learning. While The New
York Times dubbed 2012 “the year of the Mooc”, the first Asian massive open
online course, developed by the Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology, emerged only the following year.

But enthusiasm for Moocs has since waned and East Asia is strongly laced to
pioneer a global move to deliver more mainstream university teaching online.
Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore all have internet penetration rates
of 85 to 95 percent, and while that figure drops to a little over 50 percent in
mainland China, that still amounts to 840 million internet users : the largest
national cohort in the world.

Moreover,”China is one of the most technically enabled countries in the world”,

according to Hamish Coates, director of the Higher Education Division of the
Institute of Education at Tsinghua University. In particular, he cites the Haidian
district of Beijing, which houses a dozen university campuses, including
Tsinghua’s, as well as the headquarters of Google China, Microsoft China and
domestic technology firms Baidu and Xiomi.”it is one of the biggest edtech hubs
in the world,” Coates says.

Hong Kong had a head start on transitioning to online education when its public
universities replaced in – person classes and assessments with digital alternatives
last November, owing to campus closures caused by the anti-government protests
and police violence. Hence, apart from a few weeks in January, Hong Kong’s
campuses have already been running digitally for a few months.

“The hardware, software and systems are all there.” Says Yeung Yau- Yuen, an
expert in IT and science educationnat the Education University of Hong Kong
(EdUHK) and visiting professor at Sichuan Normal University.”We don’t have
enough bandwidth yet, but that will likely be solved with 5 G.”

But Yeung recognises that the somewhat patchy and impersonal experience of
Moocs is not a god model for universities to follow:”With the exception of some
very top courses, the overall quality of Moocs may not be great, “ he says..”And
there’s high dropout rate. Moocs are not the solution, as online teaching requires
guidance. It needs to be interactive, with as much face – to- face learning as
possible.”

EdUHK chose to deliver lectures and seminars via the web conferencing site
Zoom. This required some training of lecturers, but the digital switchover was
achieved with animal delays. “it’s not such a big deal. Hong Kong universities did
it in two weeks,” Yeung says. “And the mainland has also been very fast.
University students are already all online, and almost everything can be done on a
mobile phone.”

EdUHK has established schedules and standards for the online lecturers, and
marks attendance for group classes. Regular absences, except under the
exceptional circumstances, can lead to falling a course. And despite the fact that
the students are all sitting alone in a room, “there’s a sense of spirit, of
enthusiasm, when you’re all together, even if on a screen”, Yeung says. “When
you’re just learning online by yourself, it’s hard. You need learning companions.
It’s good to see other students asking questions.”

He concedes that students can still find it hard to focus when they are surrounded
by the distractions of refrigerators, games consoles and other home comforts.
Hence,”you don’t get as great a response as you do being face to face. But it’s
better than individual self- learning,”he says. The digital shift has suddenly thrust
universities’ IT departments to the forefront of managerial attention. Ian Holliday,
vice president and pro vice- chancellor (teaching and learning) at the University of
Hong Kong (HKU), is now playing a direct role in the institusion’s Technology-
Enriched Learning Initiative (TELI). Staffed by two dozen designers, developers
and IT specialists, the programme long predates the recent upheavals and was
focused on facilitating flipped classrooms, Moocs and other digital innovations.
However, the previous assumption that online learning was only a realistic option
for tech – savvy teachers has been swept away, requiring TELI to “ reach out to
everyone at the same time”, Holliday says.

“Online learning has become central to our teaching model,” Holliday says. But
he adds that the expects this to be the case only temporarily. Hence, some of the
more difficult aspects of switching to online tuition wholesale have not been
adsressed. The teaching timetable has been rejigged such that “material that can
be (easily) taught online comes first”, Holliday says. The University has also had
to “rethink student assignments, especially as the logistics of groups work are
very challenging for students who are often living in very different time zones”.
Assessments may also change, giving more weight to weekly assignments and
less weight to mass final exams, which some HKU schools may struggle to hold
online. But practical applications of knowledge learned, such as laboratory –
based classes in medicine and science, have been postponed until the end of
modules, by which time it was initially hoped that the campus would have
reopened- although HKU announced last week that classes will now be cancelled
for the entirety of the current semester, which runs until the end of May.

It is not only IT departments that have been stretched by the online switch.
Lecturers, too, have had to make major changes to their work habits, and many
report heavier workloads as they scramble to post their teaching materials online
and get to grips with what online lecturing involves. Yeung, for instance, spoke
THE via a headset from his book- lined office during his seventh Zoom meeting
of the day. He reports sometimes recording 10 videos for use in just one class, and
now needs to do student assessments one by one, instead of as a group activity.

Meanwhile, Areum Jeong, an assistant professor at the Sichuan University –

Pittsburgh Institute (SCUPI) in China, worked remotely from her native South
Korea to prepare materials for online English composition and Korean film
classes that began in late February, delivered via BigBlueButton conferencing
site. She compliments the university’s administrative staff for working”tirelessly,
around clock” to provide training sessions on how to use the sie, and she is also
grateful for the practical tips shared by fellow faculty and staff on the popular
Chinese messaging platform WeChat.

Jeong has been practising lecturing with and without video, sharing clips and
slides. She has revised her syllabi, set up course homepages and uploaded
required readings. To try to keep her students interested, she has prepared in –
class activities, group discussions, online polls and even updated her PowerPoint
presentations to make them”more eye- catching”. She admits that English writing
can be a “boring and difficult subject” for students even at the best of times,
especially for non-native-speaking science majors who may feel “uncertain and
stressed” by lengthy essay assignments. “ Establishing rapport with the students
can ce a very important factor in keeping the encouraged and engaged,”she says,
adding that she normally tries to meet in person with students as much as possible
during her office hours. In the absence of that opportunity,”adaptability and
flexibility will be key”.

Still, there are some learning experiences that cannot be replicated digitally.
Originally, Jeong wanted to hold regular movie viewings, plus Q%A sessions
with Korean films- makers. Now, one of her students is helping her look for
Chinese streaming platforms where the films can be viewed online, but she is
sorry that the students will miss out on the shared experience of watching them
together.”I imagined classes filled with students eagerly sharing their opinions
about the film’s relationship with Korean history and society,”she says

Hard evidence for the superiority of the classroom to the online experience is
actually scarce. Indeed, educational researchers Robert Bernard, Eugene
Borokhovski and Richard Schmid, from the Centre for the study of Learning and
Performance at Concordia University, Canada, told THE in 2018 that they knew
of “no empirical evidence that says that classroom instruction benefits students
(compared to alternatives) from a learning achievement perspective”. More
important than the medium was whether university teachers could “ capture and
challenge the imagination, based on the learners’ pre existing knowledge”.

The enforced pace of the online switch in China has not always made that easy to
achieve, however as the social media comments mentioned above illustrate.
Anyone who has ever tried to set up a Zoom meeting knows that there are
inevitable technical and schedulling problems when trying to link up 30 people,
much less 30 million. Indeed, in the first few days, several major Chinese web
conferencing platforms, including those of the huge domestic technology firm
Tencent, experienced crashes after receiving tenfold jumps in traffic, such that the
hashtag. # TencentClassroomCrashed trended on Weibo, a popular social media
channel.

China’s Ministry of Education announced in February that the nation had 22

online platforms providing 24,000 free higher education courses, covering 12
disciplines for undergraduates and 18 at a “higher vocational education level”.
These options will be helpful for regional or smaller institutions that may not have
the means to produce online alternatives quickly. Meanwhile, some elite
institutions have gone beyond merely shifting their teaching online. Peking
University, for instance, is also offering online trauma counselling, employment
advice, thesis supervision and other support services. And some senior sector
figures are convinced that while physical campuses will retain enormous value
once the epidemic is over, there may be no going back to a fully analogue model
of university instruction.

HKU’s Holliday, for instance, expects that “ many colleagues will make
permanent changes to their teaching practice as a result of what happens in these
few weeks. Already we’re finding that while there are bound to be problems and
challenges, some students and teachers are writing in to applaud the things they
really like about online teaching . Our task will be retain those aspects and
integrate them with face – to – face teaching once the campus returns to normal.”

Tsinghua’s Coates also thinks that “there will almost certainly be a post – virus
boom” in online higher education. “ We didn’t even know this was possible ,” he
says of mass online learning. “ But now you have major university systems
proving it to presidents, funders and governments.”

He adds that the main development that has taken place in the past few weeks is
not so much a technical one as a cultural one among administrators and
goverments.”Online education has matured into the mainstream,” he says. “The
big thing is legitimation.”

Nevertheless, there remain likely limits to how far the longer-term digital
switchover might go. That is because, however successful a university is in
conducing its teaching online, there would appear to be no good virtual subtituties
for field trips or academic exchanges never main the social and cultural attractions
of campus life, from band nights to sporting events. Christy Kan, a master’s
student in journalism at HKU, has taken Moocs before, so has had no technical
difficulties adjusting to online learning. However, she feels that interactions
online can be “quite weird”, as some students prefer to turn off their computers’
cameras and microphones, leaving teachers to lecture to “ black screens” for hours
on end. In her experience, students also tend to ask fewer questions online, and
some have had trouble making class because of time zone differences. Asked
about the prospect of longer term campus closures, she responds :” No one wants
this to happen!” Echoing the view of the university leaders who responded to
THE’s 2018 surve, Kan adds that “ as a student, I value campus life very much .
Of course, the university can switch face- to – face learning to online learning any
time, but the real life campus experience cannot go virtual.”

Joyce.lau@timeshighereducation.com