One of the biggest risks of the pandemic-related shift to online learning is that universities separate this strategy from their core research activities, according to a pioneer in digital education.

Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, said a key part of the institution¡¯s success in transitioning to a technology-enhanced ¡°teaching, learning and discovery environment¡±, which started long before the Covid-19 crisis, was keeping the academic faculty front of mind.

¡°We¡¯re a regular university with over 5,000 faculty members. Thousands of them are involved in discovery and creativity and heavy research; we¡¯ve got hundreds of millions of dollars of research activities at the core; we spend tens of millions of dollars a?year on a library that¡¯s at the core; we have a staff of hundreds of people working to curate knowledge and synthesise knowledge,¡± he said during a Times Higher Education event to launch THE?Campus, a new virtual community for academics to share best practice in online teaching and learning.

THE Campus launch: ASU president Michael Crow on the future of online learning in higher education

However, Professor Crow said, ¡°the risk¡± for institutions only just starting to move to digital or blended teaching on a permanent basis was that they ¡°drift off the cliff that some for-profit universities have gone down, which is that they forget or don¡¯t know how or never wanted to participate in the notion of a?faculty¡±.

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¡°If the digitisation of teaching and learning activities moves away from the core of knowledge, then it will fail ¨C as it has in so many for-profit cases and in some not-for-profit universities. But if it stays attached to the core, then the ship is moored in the right way to the right thing. That¡¯s the big worry I?have in digitisation,¡± he said.

Professor Crow added that Arizona State did not ¡°make a faculty member become technologically advanced¡± or ¡°make a department go online¡± but rather created a central enterprise unit, called EdPlus, that focused on the design and scalable delivery of digital teaching and learning, and offered interested academics advanced levels of training in various areas.

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¡°Thousands and thousands of our faculty members, without a single request, have all taken that training, and they have augmented their ability now to use those assets,¡± he said. ¡°The key was the construction of the mechanism that allowed for creativity to be accelerated.¡±

Professor Crow ¨C who said the institution was spending $40?million to $50?million (?29?million-?37?million) a?year on EdPlus and its related technology partnerships ¨C also rejected the notion that remote synchronous learning was cheaper than in-person teaching.

¡°If anything, there¡¯s a cost acceleration because now we¡¯re using a technological set of systems to mediate between the learners who are still coming together live, still interacting. The faculty are still engaged in the same way ¨C in fact, the faculty now are engaged in multiple ways at the same time,¡± he said.

ellie.bothwell@timeshighereducation.com