The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, emergency remote instruction on higher education

In March 2020, millions of unaware and unprepared college students, faculty and administrators were forced to adapt to emergency remote learning and instruction to protect against the spread of COVID-19. 

 

The pandemic continues, and members of the higher education community are questioning the roles and significance that technology, and online learning holds within education. 

 

Remote learning is an emergency measure only used for the continuity of learning. Remote courses typically are designed for in-person instruction, and are not intended to be taught through a distance modality, according to Members of the Council for Online Education in an article titled “Emergency Remote Instruction is Not Quality Online Learning.”

 

The council members wrote that effective online learning requires advanced planning and special skills. They are courses designed for online spaces, and the tools and technology for those courses must be carefully selected and managed by trained instructors. 

 

More than 80% of institutions were reliant on fully online learning or “emergency remote learning” during the pandemic – 50% of courses were remote due to the emergency, and 31% were fully online learning courses to begin with, according to a 2021 survey report by researchers for the Quality Matter consortium’s Changing Landscape of Online Education project. 

 

“What we see in the data is that enrollment did go down at many institutions and colleges in Ohio,” the Senior Vice Chancellor of the Ohio Department for Higher Education said. “It’s hard to know exactly what the reasons are. But we do know there are alot of causes.” 

 

Duffey noted one cause to be a macro trend of the pandemic, which is the decline of birth rates across the United States that has led to decreased enrollment within education, especially post-secondary institutions. 

 

“There are roughly 1.6 million Ohioans who have some college education but no degree,” Duffey said. “When you think about the ones (students) that could come back, you need to question how do (those students) need to be served?” 

 

Serving those students' needs can also provide institutions with an opportunity to combat decreased enrollment, Duffey said. Duffey gave an example of how institutions could offer access to a wider variety of courses in both in-person online formats to adult students living in the surrounding city of Athens, or students living in more remote parts of Ohio, like Cleveland. 

 

This would increase enrollment in Ohio University, and increase the population of students paying tuition. This creates economies of scale, which are the cost advantages that increase an institution's efficiency and ability to remain healthy, Duffey said. 

 

The U.S. Census Bureau conducts Household Pulse Surveys that collect information from all 50 states, and are designed to give real-time data regarding the impact of COVID-19 on people’s lives. 

 

Week 43 of the Census Bureau’s survey had a weighted response of 7.9%. It found four leading reasons respondents changed their educational plans or arrangements. 6,028,900 students said their plans changed because they were concerned about contracting coronavirus. 1,313,980 students said having to care for others disrupted their educational arrangements. 

 

10,262,398 students said institutions changing the content or format of their courses was the reason, and 5, 261,164 students said financial instability due to a change in income from the pandemic was the reason. 

 

“During that remote experience, I firmly feel that faculty and students did the very best that they could in a very stressful, unplanned situation. Some faculty had days to move a face-to-face course online to the remote teaching modality, and they had no preparation. They had never taught online,” Quality Matters Director of Research and Innovation Bethany Simunich said. 

 

There were several factors outside of students' control that impacted the educational experience during the pandemic, Simunich said. Students were forced to leave school, to adapt to an unfamiliar remote classroom, to be separated from friends and campus resources while possibly dealing with distracting home environments, working part or full-time or coping with illness or loss due to the virus.

 

“You (students) didn’t have the same cognitive space to engage in your education during the early days of the pandemic, during the whole first year,” Simunich said. 

 

Quality online learning is designed for learning and instructing in a virtual space, which creates access to education for a wider variety of students in ways Simunich feels face-to-face learning cannot. However, transferring in-person teaching methods to an online platform is ineffective, because it can negatively impact student engagement and class presence, Simunich siad. 

 

Aaron Bond, Senior Director for Learning Services for Virginia Tech University, said emergency remote teaching was not a measure of quality learning, it was doing what was necessary to survive. He said the pandemic proved the need for quality standards and rubrics in online learning

 

Politics at Virginia Tech are a huge component in the discussion on online learning, Bond said. Currently, there is no appetite for complete online undergraduate programs at the university, because the pandemic has left a bad taste in many people's mouths. However, Bond said 90% of his students have requested the option for remote access to his courses. 

 

“It (the pandemic) definitely left people wanting better stuff and better quality…” Bond said. “And students still want flexibility.” 

 

Moving into a new era, Bond feels professors have to make students aware of where to access course information, to have a defined calendar and syllabus, to limit the cognitive load placed on students and to remain in constant communication with students in online courses. He added students need to understand online doesn’t mean easier; doing the coursework and staying engaged is still necessary to succeed.  

 

Before 2020, Catherine Ramirez, a University of California Santa Cruz professor and chair of the Latin American and Latino studies department, had no experience with remote or online instruction. Since then, Ramirez has found both benefits and problems with remote and online instruction.

 

She said remote and online instruction are new learning tools, not unlike the chalkboard or PowerPoint when both were introduced. “Change is often scary and difficult, and this has been a moment of humongous transformation for just about everyone,” Ramirez said. 

 

Ramirez said many of the problems come from the socio-economic class of her students. UC Santa Cruz is a federally designated Hispanic Serving Institution, or HSI, meaning the student population is at least 25% Hispanic (Santa Cruz’s student population is one-third Hispanic, Ramirez said). 

 

In addition, 94% of the students within Ramirez’s department are Hispanic, and the majority of them are also first-generation students; Ramirez said many of her students are considered working-poor. Many of them cannot afford to even live in Santa Cruz, many students are wrestling full-time jobs, living with multiple family members, dealing with medical issues, taking care of dependents, or other economic issues outside of the classroom. That makes access to quality online learning necessary, Ramirez said. 

 

Ramirez said many education students today are not being prepared to teach in spaces where traditional forms of teaching are not ideal because of disparity and inequity. 

 

“My concern, again, goes back to class and privilege,” Ramirez said. “Are the first-gen students and the low-income students the ones who are going to have to settle for that virtual experience? That approximation of the in-person experience that their wealthier, more privileged classmates are getting?” 

 

Ezra Silkes and Moira Armstrong,co-founders of the Kent State Covid Coalition at Kent State  University in Ohio, also have noted disparities, inequities and privilege at their institution with remote and online learning. 

 

Armstrong and Silkes decided to create the coalition in response to Kent State’s reduced COVID protocols, especially with the rise of the Omicron variant of the virus. 

 

“We’ve been very disappointed to see our university ignore the fact that we are in a place to make intelligent COVID based decisions,” Silkes said. 

 

The two said their demands were based on policies previously enacted at Kent State, and best practices they’ve seen from health agencies and the Ohio Department of Public Health, all geared toward ensuring in-person classes could resume. 

 

“Things like masks and testing, and these mitigation measures, make it so COVID doesn’t get worse, there doesn’t need to be emergency shutdowns and pivots to remote learning,” Armstrong said. 

 

Silkes said Kent State, and furthermore the country, has decided it is time to move forward and there will be no looking back at what else could be done while disregarding the pandemic not being over. 

 

The administration is aware of the coalition, what it is doing, what its demands are, but they are deliberately ignoring the coalition to avoid acknowledging its concerns, Silkes said. 

 

Acknowledging the material reality of the pandemic not being over is detrimental to public health and safety, Silkes said. Many students didn’t have the mental capacity to deal with academics while also dealing with a new virus in 2020; however, remote and online instruction has evolved since, Silkes said – what technology can do and what society has the capacity to do with technology is overlooked. 

 

“When we say in-person (courses) are the best for everyone, whose stories are we ignoring?” Silkes said. It is ignoring diverse groups and life experiences that are better served when it is remembered that COVID is still very real, Silkes said. 

 

As the argument for remote access increases and the pandemic takes new shape, Silkes said the idealization of a perfect college experience is going to get people killed, primarily those who don’t fit into the right category of people.