Albany Business Review Table of Experts

TABLE of EXPERTS

Education in the Age — and the Aftermath — of Covid

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he Albany Business Review hosted a virtual discussion with four experts, moderated by Advertising Director, Walter Thorne, to discuss how the events of the past year have changed education.

Across educational institutions, what structural changes to the educational process transpired over the last year during Covid? JAMES SCHLEGEL: The most obvious one was trying to educate students who couldn’t be in the building. We learned quickly last March that we needed to be able to deliver instruction to students who couldn’t physically be in the building. Some of our teachers were well equipped for that because they’d integrated educational technology or instructional technology into their daily routine and made a quick and easy transition. Some of our teachers weren’t really practicing with some of those tools and they sped up and got going as quickly as they could. THOMAS GAMBLE: There’s a tradition of online instruction in higher ed. We didn’t have all of the technology, but we had some and we know some of the techniques. What was interesting was having to figure out how to do administrative functions remotely. We had to recreate the registration process, the financial aid packaging process, the admissions process, the advising process. We feel like we met those pretty well.

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DAVID SCHEJBAL: Excelsior is a fully online institution, so we had the benefit of not disrupting our students’ learning experiences because they were already all studying online. Even though we’re a fully online educational institution, our administrative services were all in-house and on-site. We had to transition to remote work and go through the same adjustments that nearly every industry went through. CBA has been in-person all year, correct? SCHLEGEL: We have. Our students, for the most part, want to be here. We started the year with about 40 of our 540 online. And then that number grew as the year went on. A couple of reasons for that, I think, is that they found we were able to deliver the instruction. But they did clearly miss the human interaction. This is what it’s all about in a school like ours. We pride ourselves in the relationships that are built in the school and the relationships that are formed and last throughout somebody’s lifetime. We missed a lot of opportunities when everyone was home. Getting people back together slowly but steadily has been helpful, even certain things like fans in the stands at a game, or any kind of gathering, remind you how special those times are and how important they are in the lives of the students. What are the biggest challenges that schools of all segments, whether they be K-12 or higher ed, face as they prepare to get back to safe learning environments in order to reopen? DANIEL WOODSIDE: All students are resilient. I think they want to return to normal settings. What you hear most from them is that they miss the interaction with their peers and the faculty. It’s also really difficult to work in groups and collaborate and conduct hands-on learning based on that remote setting. Hands-on learning programs have proven to be really effective for the retention of material. There’s so much focus now around STEM skills for college and career readiness. How do we do that in a remote setting effectively? It’s really an exciting time for education design because we’re spending so much time focusing on these types of spaces. Now, maybe there is a choice for hybrid learning. Even in the P-12 level, maybe there’s still a way to provide some choice as we move forward on a post-Covid scale.

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What are the other challenges, technologically?

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WOODSIDE: The digital divide has really proven to be an enormous issue that needs to be addressed at a regional and national scale to provide a learning environment that

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