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シンポジウムCOVID-19 Challenges for Universities and Post-COVID Education
BULLSMITH, Christofer(Atomi University)

1. Interrelated COVID-19 challenges for universities
The effect of COVID-19 directly on the ability to run and attend classes is receiving alot of attention at the moment. However, running classes is not all that universities do:for example, they also facilitate international travel, do research, and are governed bycommittees following certain rules. These areas are all interrelated, and one result isthat the educator in the classroom cannot overcome the challenges of COVID-19 alone.

1.1 Reduced international mobility
Reduced physical mobility, particularly across national borders, means fewer incominginternational students. For many universities, this means not only a drop in income
from international fees, but also a harder to quantify loss in the richness of campus life
as diversity drops. Foreign classmates become rarer, and some courses that rely on adiverse or non-local student profile (for example, intercultural discussion, modernJapanese culture) may no longer be viable. The loss of incoming overseas academics
likewise changes the character of courses, conferences, and symposia. At the same time,
local students are losing the opportunity to study abroad to seek those sameintercultural or foreign-language experiences.
In response, universities need to explore virtual/online options, perhaps for all of
incoming students, incoming teachers, and outgoing students. There are obvious
opportunities for successful online offerings to add value to universities post-COVID,
as cheaper and more convenient than physically visiting, even if missing some aspectsof the actual travel or study-aboard experience.

1.2 Research
COVID has impacted getting funding, collecting data, collaborating with others, andaccessing facilities. Researchers who depend on physical access to laboratories, forexample, are likely finding this year frustrating. While some individuals may benefit
from a year reduced to running thought experiments or reviewing old data, a general
upside from a year of lost lab access seems unlikely. Library databases and otherChristofer Bullsmith

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digital resources may become easier to access (24-7, from off-site, and so on); improved
familiarity with online collaborative tools and methods may enable wider collaborationin the future without the need for actual travel.
For me personally, though, working on language education and interested in digitallearning, there are more positives than negatives. Live classes are recorded, nominallyfor review or for students who were unable to attend, and can be a trove of data whenreexamined. On-demand classes can yield a lot of data: even basic LMS functions cantrack which students do what, when, for how long, and what is produced, or whatscores gained. Running online versions of courses previously offered in the classroom
yields data enabling comparative studies. It looks likely that online and in-person
strands will be running concurrently for some time, yielding yet more comparative
data on different learning modalities.

1.3 GovernanceIn order to continue to fulfil some version of their usual educational functions while thephysical mobility of staff and students is limited, universities need to move rapidly toalter policies and rules. Unfortunately, the processes required to alter those policies
and rules – meeting, drafting and reviewing official documents, passing and recording
resolutions through a series of committees – likely depend on in-person meetings andhaving plenty of time. Further, the priorities of some universities may need to change
during the pandemic, for example, to focus on non-educational social roles theinstitution

usually

fulfils(providing

counselling,

healthcare,cheapmeals,

opportunities to develop social skills or avoid depression through peer contact, and soon). Success at continuing to provide educational services will be empty if students are
dropping out or worse.
Having witnessed university responses both in New Zealand after an earthquake
rendered the campus largely inaccessible, and now in Japan during a pandemic, myimpression is that governance in a time of crisis is a particular problem in Japan.
People and institutions here are careful and risk-averse, un-used to taking
responsibility for proposing dramatic novel solutions or to the adversarial style ofargument required to evaluate such a proposal in a single session. Documents areusually on paper, with decisions requiring multiple staff to physically stamp theoriginal document. It is proving difficult to overcome this bureaucratic inertia whilelargely unable to meet or ratify official documents.
While painful this year, the changes (towards allowing virtual meetings, electronic

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documents, electronic signing, use of collaborative drafting tools, and so on) should bepositive going forward, in terms of productivity in normal years, in terms of ecologicalimpact, and in terms of the resilience of governance in times of natural disaster orcrisis.

1.4 Classes
For many teachers, and society at large, the shift to distance education has meant acrash course in the methods, tools, formats and terminology of the field. Classes can besynchronous (run like a virtual live class using Zoom, Teams, etc.) or asynchronous(on-demand) delivering media (video, text, audio) to students, who respond throughonline tests and forms or by sending in their own video, text, or audio. While one
method to achieve this is correspondence education, sometimes with radio or television
broadcasts to deliver media, online methods offer a quicker, richer, and moreinteractive experience.
2. What changes to education will (or ‘should’) remain post-COVID?

2.1 Online classes are here to stay: convenience, resilience
In line with my comments on international mobility, research, and governance, being
able to do some things online – remotely, instantly, without travel – is surely too
convenient to give up entirely. Even where the in-person classroom is the central
educational paradigm, a remote visiting lecturer on screen or a remote student(perhaps given some classroom presence through a screen) will surely be more common
going forward. Maintaining these options as common (if exceptional) options increases
the accessibility of education, not just in the face of pandemics and major naturaldisasters, but also individual disasters like a student breaking a leg or a lecturer being
stuck in Hawaii for a week-long conference. Indeed, corporate workers who have tasted
the convenience of working from home (and companies willing to let them, given thesaving on office space, and provided productivity is maintained) will drive thecontinued development and increasing social acceptability of these as options, meaningin turn that universities will be obliged to ensure students are familiar with them.

2.2 Online classes are here to stay: pedagogical effectConvenience, accessibility, and resilience are not the only reasons some distanceeducation methods will likely remain post-COVID. Put simply, sometimes distancelearning modalities are pedagogically preferable. To take examples from language
learning, some students may find it easier to participate in remote discussions because
text chat is familiar and low-stress, or because the option to not look at other people

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while speaking reduces their anxiety. Students who cannot reliably understand alecture in English in real-time can re-watch on-demand video, and even play it backmore slowly or check automatically created subtitles. Recording and submitting ashort presentation is less stressful than giving it live, and encourages repeatedrehearsal, which is a learning opportunity. Students studying alone are forced to gain
more autonomy in their study and time-management habits, and so on. Overall,having a well-executed online component in a course is likely to be a pedagogicalpositive, and growing appreciation of this will lead to an increase in ‘blended’ classes.
Indeed, the benefits of having students study preparatory material in their own time
before a live class, so the class can center on discussion, output, directed case studies
and so on is clear. Indeed, against a background of the usual class style being an
in-person lecture followed by solitary homework, having an on-demand online lecturecompleted at home followed by active classroom activities has for some time beencalled a ‘flipped’ or ‘inverted’ classroom; but as the pedagogical benefits of this kind of
blended modality are more widely accepted, these labels are often being dropped. Thatis, a blended class where output and discussion class activities follow online self-study
is the new normal and no longer feels like the reversal of a usual pattern.
The spread of this kind of blended system naturally means that in-person classes willchange: if the lecture is taken care of before the class, the class can be shorter, moreinteractive, centered on students using and extending the knowledge gained in thelecture (more like a tutorial). However, even in courses where there is no online
component post-COVID, we might hope to see some changes. That is, a period of being
unable to have in-person classes and then contrasting in-person and online classes
might drive teachers to recognize the strengths of in-person classes afresh. Morepedagogical options, and more reflection on the topic, may result in better teaching.

2.3 Online classes are here to stay: examples overseas
The percentage of university students in the US taking one or more online courses has
increased steadily from over 21% in 2008, to over 48% in 2018.1 The number ofuniversity students in Oregon taking only online courses increased over the same
period from 6.2% to 14.2%.2 Interest in remote work technologies and learning during
the COVID pandemic, a variety of maturing and likely disruptive technologies
including virtual assistants and virtual reality, and the gradual entry of teaching staff
more familiar with relevant technologies into university-level positions (for example,Gmail was released in 2004 and iPhones in 2007, so some lecturers today will haveused Gmail in primary school, and then used an iPhone all through high school, stillwith time to finish a PhD before COVID hit) seems likely to allow this growth toCOVID-19 challenges for universities and post-COVID education

125continue. Now that students and other stakeholders in Japan, hitherto somewhat
isolated from developments in educational technology by the language barrier, havetasted the convenience, resilience, and pedagogical possibilities of online education,
Japan will have to follow suit.
________
1

College Board figures, https://research.collegeboard.org/

2 Wallis, L. (2020). ‘Growth in Distance Learning Outpaces Total Enrollment Growth’. Oregon

Employment Department. https://www.qualityinfo.org/