Giving Compass' Take:

• Mordecai I. Brownlee, at EdSurge, encourages leaders to innovate higher education's remote environment to improve inclusion and engagement.

• How does higher education's remote environment currently disengage marginalized communities? How might this have a lasting impact on the well-being of those communities? What can we do to support innovations to address this issue?

• Search for resources to guide your giving towards improving higher education's remote environment.

COVID-19 has exposed the flaws in our ability to deliver remote education in a manner that is equitable, inclusive—and innovative.

To serve students during the pandemic and beyond, I believe institutions not only must innovate their approaches to learning, but also their approaches to teaching. No longer should we accept that simply delivering curricular materials online constitutes real innovation, nor that the incorporation of instructional videos is a sure-shot method of engaging students. Unfortunately, the “sage on the stage” from before the coronavirus has now become the “sage on the computer screen.”

The truth is, while many institutions have used the idea of “innovation” as a marketing ploy, the pandemic has exposed the lack of innovation in academe.

But student retention and persistence in the remote, online environment can be improved—if faculty are better prepared to creatively deliver engaging instruction that is relevant to today’s job market.

In a recent study conducted by McKinsey & Company, statistical models based on academic studies estimated the potential influence of school closures on learning. The study found that not only were students less likely to succeed in the new online environments hurriedly crafted by many institutions in response to COVID-19, but that learning loss will probably be greatest among low-income, Black, and Hispanic students, primarily because the learning loss varied significantly by access to remote learning, the quality of remote instruction, home support, and the degree of student engagement. Furthermore, the study projected that this lack of learning could diminish students’ earning potential over their lifetimes and even reduce the U.S. gross domestic product.

Read the full article about improving higher education's remote environment by Mordecai I. Brownlee at EdSurge.