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Hybrid courses can be beneficial. Some advantages are student and professor convince, flexibility, decrease in drop-outs, and teaching in various ways to help students with different learning skills. There are studies that show the correlation between hybrid courses and students achievement in undergraduate and graduate level.

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Colleges and universities in the spring had to move online abruptly due to campus' shutting down. The next fall and spring semesters were either all online or a mix of both and that caused lots of pressure on America's universities. There was a big struggle since less than 5% of college budgets are dedicated to IT spending. Due to the shift in online learning so many new educational tools through technology have emerged.

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Executive Summary

Pre-pandemic, there was already widespread acknowledgement that the traditional higher education business model is seriously challenged. Fall 2020 marks a clear inflection point as students, educators, and government leaders alike scrutinize the price and value proposition of higher education through the new lens of traditional classroom versus multiple modes of digital delivery. What's more, machine learning, SMS messaging, and AI are having a growing impact in optimizing student services and support. These technological developments make it imperative for college leaders and the policymakers who govern them to make digital transformation and technology a much more central strategic priority, especially when it comes to their core businesses: learning and credentialing. This school year marks a major inflection point for America's colleges and universities. Which institutions will seize the moment to transform, and which ones will be left behind?

Mark Leary/Getty Images

Higher education is being pummeled by the Covid-19 pandemic. This spring's campus shutdowns led to a quick rush to "remote learning," exposing the fragmented adoption of high-quality education technology and digital capabilities across thousands of colleges and universities. The tumultuous fall semester, complete with aborted campus openings and widely diverging online and blended options, has only increased the pressure on America's colleges and universities.

Pre-pandemic, there was already widespread acknowledgement that the traditional higher education business model is seriously challenged. Fall 2020 marks a clear inflection point as students, educators, and government leaders alike scrutinize the price and value proposition of higher education through the new lens of traditional classroom versus multiple modes of digital delivery.

A number of elite institutions - such as Princeton University, Williams College, Spelman College, and American University - have substantially discounted tuition for their fully online experience in an historically unprecedented fashion, highlighting pricing pressures and opening up Pandora's box. This comes after a decade of growth in postsecondary alternatives, including "massively open online courses" (MOOCs), industry-driven certification programs, and coding bootcamps. This moment is likely to be remembered as a critical turning point between the "time before," when analog on-campus degree-focused learning was the default, to the "time after," when digital, online, career-focused learning became the fulcrum of competition between institutions.

Higher education has significantly lagged behind other industries in moving to a more digitally-driven, outcomes-focused business model. One measure of this is that less than 5% of college budgets are dedicated to IT spending. According to U.S. Department of Education data, while one-third of all U.S. college students had some type of online course experience before the pandemic, the other two-thirds remained traditional campus-based lectures - little-changed from hundreds of years ago. Education is one of the least digitized and most people-intensive economic sectors - suggesting that the opportunity for and risk of technology-driven disruption is strong. Following a slow, two-decade march toward more digital business models, higher education's overdue technological transformation has been rapidly accelerated by the events of 2020, and centers more than ever on technology- and analytics-driven online learning experiences and business models.

As in many other economic sectors, the digital transformation of postsecondary education is being increasingly driven by start-up companies and private capital. According to investment intelligence firm HolonIQ, the first half of 2020 was the second-largest half year for global edtech investment - at $4.5 billion - three times greater than the average 6-months of VC investment during the prior decade. Much of this investment is focused on higher education and its intersection with the workforce. Unlike other industries - such as finance and healthcare - education has lagged behind in having a capitalized "industry" to support it, but those trends are now rapidly catching up.

Next-Gen Online Learning Scaled via Algorithms

Online learning became the default in 2020, but the approach most colleges are employing is simple "remote learning" via live Zoom classes, a method little evolved from video conferencing from the late-1990s. However, in the multi-billion dollar market for fully online courses and degrees, a variety of powerful new platforms and technologies have emerged, grounded in cloud computing, enormous datasets, and artificial intelligence. MOOC platforms such as Coursera and EdX leverage data from tens of millions of learners and billions of course datapoints, using machine learning to automatically grade assignments and deliver adaptive content and assessments.

Forward-thinking institutions like the University of Illinois are disrupting the graduate degree market using technology that reduces faculty labor to scale programs to thousands of students at a discounted cost of $22,000 for an entire M.B.A. - leading to the retirement of its traditional residential degree offering. Georgia Tech's pioneering online masters in computer science program, which costs only $7,000, recently announced they've exceeded 10,000 enrollments for this fall. There are now more than 50 MOOC-based degrees worldwide, many priced at even deeper discounts. The aggregation of multiple universities and their courses and programs into single distributed platforms is also opening up new business-to-business (B2B) channels through direct partnerships with employers. Online education providers like StraighterLine and Udemy are taking this trend even further, offering Netflix-like options for students to earn transferrable college credits or other credentials for a monthly subscription.

AI- and Analytics-Driven Student Support and Teaching

Machine learning, SMS messaging, and AI are also having a growing impact in optimizing student services and support. Like commercial businesses, many universities are beginning to deploy blended and fully AI-based chatbots to support students and answer questions - integrating with their learning management systems, enabling blended use cases that empower student service personnel with data, or using pattern recognition to help students navigate key admissions, enrollment, and course deadlines. These approaches are also extending into digitizing campus services via smart speakers in student dorms - basic self-service innovations that make the higher ed experience more customer-centric, while bringing down costs. AI is even being leveraged by institutions such as Georgia Tech, which pioneered the use of an AI-based teaching assistant in its online degree programs. More generally, many universities are investing in predictive analytics, enabled by the data generated by learning activity that takes place online - but which often relies on access to outside consulting experts and datasets.

Digital Credentialing and Data-Driven Education-Workforce Alignment

Another major trend is the digitization and explosion of educational credentials - a rapid shift from static educational records and transcripts, previously an extremely analog process that centered around degrees, to online, digital credentials focused on certificates and certifications that summarize achievement, skills or competency. This trend is being driven by employers and industry certification programs, working in partnership with community colleges, extension schools, and university graduate programs - and is central to the " unbundling " of degrees into shorter-form microcredentials that can stack into a larger lifelong curriculum. Many elite business and extension schools have embraced this direction and the new revenue streams that new types of digital credentials represent.

The market is increasingly demanding that colleges and universities move beyond bachelor's degrees as their primary product, toward more nimble, lower-priced, digital "credentialized packages" of learning and mastery valued by - which will be essential in a digital economy where continuous upskilling is needed to keep pace with technological advances and the shrinking shelf-life of skills. This move away from one-and-done degrees and toward lifelong learning and upskilling is central to achieving the widely-embraced goal of greater education-workforce alignment, which hinges on integrating college and employer hiring/HR systems that today lack the standards and attention to connect - and which could open up a more fluid and efficient ecosystem in digital skills, including the "credentialized" recognition of job skills and work experiences. It's worth noting that such a change to the system may also unlock opportunity for some 71 million Americans who, according to recent research, have the skills to succeed in higher-wage jobs but are systematically overlooked because they lack four-year degrees.

Time for Higher Education to Prioritize Digital Strategy

These technological developments make it imperative for college leaders and the policymakers who govern them to make digital transformation and technology a much more central strategic priority, especially when it comes to their core businesses: learning and credentialing. The accrual of valuable intellectual property and market share in a handful of key education technology companies also makes developing sound partnership models with outside firms much more critical. Many top universities, for example, have committed to decade-long, multi-million dollar contracts and joint ventures with education online program managers (OPMs) in core, critical academic areas. If structured properly, these partnerships can enable universities to leap forward.

Higher education is also starting to experience the technology-driven consolidation of market share and power that's already occurred in other industries. This is already happening in online learning: 2,500 colleges offer online programs, but the 100 largest players have nearly 50% of student enrollment, according to U.S. Department of Education data. This fall, the long-forecast consolidation of the higher ed market is accelerating, hastened by the inequities of the pandemic. While the digital road ahead for colleges is long, these capabilities are core to survival.

Finally, the rise of technology-driven college alternatives and degree substitutes means there will be many more options for both consumers and employers to sort through. This will require new digital learning standards and infrastructure - as well as regulation that is attentive to quality assurance, but that also encourages innovation. During this digital learning transformation, institutional, student, and employer behaviors are all simultaneously shifting, making this a critical time for evaluating outcomes and business cases, and revisiting strategies and policies through a fresh lens.

This school year marks a major inflection point for America's colleges and universities. Which institutions will seize the moment to transform, and which ones will be left behind?

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The Pandemic Pushed Universities Online. The Change Was Long Overdue.

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Executive Summary Pre-pandemic, there was already widespread acknowledgement that the traditional higher education business model is seriously challenged. Fall 2020 marks a clear inflection point as students, educators, and government leaders alike scrutinize the price and value proposition of higher education through the new lens of traditional classroom versus multiple modes of digital delivery.

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Young adults and older teens are being hit the hardest with mental health issues such as depression, loneliness, and anxiety. Loneliness is a big part of this issue for this group of people. This feeling of loneliness leads into a downward spiral Which leads them into struggling with depression and anxiety. Public education needs to remove the stigma of loneliness and help students.

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As psychologists worry that the coronavirus pandemic is triggering a loneliness epidemic, new Harvard research suggests feelings of social isolation are on the rise and that those hardest hit are older teens and young adults.

In the recently released results of a study conducted last October by researchers at Making Caring Common, 36 percent of respondents to a national survey of approximately 950 Americans reported feeling lonely "frequently" or "almost all the time or all the time" in the prior four weeks, compared with 25 percent who recalled experiencing serious issues in the two months prior to the pandemic. Perhaps most striking is that 61 percent of those aged 18 to 25 reported high levels.

"I was surprised at the degree of loneliness among young people," said Richard Weissbourd, a psychologist and senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) who helped lead the research. "If you look at other studies on the elderly, their rates of loneliness are high, but they don't seem to be as high as they are for young people."

The unsettling statistic is even more troubling when combined with June data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that 63 percent of young people reported experiencing substantial symptoms of anxiety and depression. "It's a group that we are really concerned about," said Weissbourd, who suspects several factors are at work.

Older teens and young adults may be particularly susceptible because they are often transitioning from their "inherited families to their chosen families," said Weissbourd, meaning they lack important connections to those who can "be critical guardrails against loneliness." Students in college may be struggling to fit in and feel homesick, while those not in school can feel disconnected from important social groups or communities. Young people are also often making critical decisions about their professional and personal lives and relationships, which can add to the stress and sense of isolation, he said.

"If every person who's in pretty good shape can make a commitment to reaching out to one person they are concerned might be lonely once a week, that would be a good thing."

- Richard Weissbourd, psychologist, senior lecturer at the Graduate School of Education

The new report also points to the way such feelings can lead to a downward spiral. Many young people who reported serious loneliness also said they felt as if no one "genuinely cared" about them. The survey also suggests that lonely people often feel they're reaching out or listening to other people more than other people are reaching out or listening to them. "These things can become self-defeating," said Weissbourd. "When you feel like you're trying hard while other people are not trying hard, or you feel like you're going to get rejected again, you withdraw, which increases your loneliness and your anxiety about social situations."

Weissbourd and his team argue that eliminating loneliness requires a robust social infrastructure. Schools can be important points of intervention, they suggest, where teachers can be trained to connect parents to each other and to ensure every student is connected to a school adult. Doctors should also be asking about loneliness during annual physicals, helping connect patients who are struggling with social supports; high schools, colleges, and senior centers should focus on connecting young people with the elderly; and employers should check in with employees about whether they are lonely and provide them with resources that support connection. To further reduce the stigma associated with loneliness, the authors also recommend the creation of national, state, and local campaigns that stress the importance of maintaining social ties, and reassure those suffering that it's OK to seek help.

"We need public education that removes the stigma of loneliness and really tries to alleviate the shame," said Weissbourd, "because shame can also be self-defeating and cause you to avoid social situations or hide your true feelings in ways that make meaningful connections with others very hard."

Weissbourd said he and his colleagues consider combating loneliness a moral imperative in an increasingly "hyper-individualistic society," where many people often choose to focus on the well-being of their small circle of family and friends.

"We're making the case that there's a moral matter in terms of our community health, and that those of us who are in a position to do so should try to reach out to people who may be lonely. If every person who's in pretty good shape can make a commitment to reaching out to one person they are concerned might be lonely once a week, that would be a good thing."

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Young adults hardest hit by loneliness during pandemic, study finds

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As psychologists worry that the coronavirus pandemic is triggering a loneliness epidemic, new Harvard research suggests feelings of social isolation are on the rise and that those hardest hit are older teens and young adults.

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The graph above shows the change in global surface average temperatures from 1880- 2020. Earth’s surface continues to significantly warm, with recent global temperatures being the hottest in the past 2,000-plus years.

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COVID-19 is not just a virus we can brush off. It not only impacts people's health, but it impacts all aspects of our society. We see poverty being hit hard and the economy and government changing and having to adapt to a new way of living. Plans need to be made and implemented in order for our world to be ready for when a pandemic breaks out again; it is crucial for our world.