Abstract
The spread of the novel coronavirus at the start of 2020 shocked higher education across China then around the rest of the world. To ensure sustainability of learning, this required an unprecedented shift from campus-based to emergency online education. This created an urgent need to learn more about the quality of online education, the provision of global education, and the transformation potential of universities. This paper analyses these matters, presenting insights from large-scale research conducted on a leading Chinese university, the first ever major research university to make this substantial transition. This research applied a mixed methods design, which combines quantitative and qualitative approaches. The results provide important insight into the nature, quality, and outcomes of online learning in major Asian research universities. They signal critical areas that require reform to ensure the sustainability of future higher education.
Highlights
To keep people apart and ensure the sustainability of learning, governments implemented social distancing and self-isolation measures, which emptied campuses, causing students and faculty to work from home. This pandemic provoked a rapid shift to emergency forms of online learning among major education systems, institutions, faculty, and students
Even after just a few months, the world’s most eminent higher education scholars and leaders recognize that universities are likely to be impacted so dramatically that they will be fundamentally different after the pandemic [1,2]
The findings hasten the formation of blended forms of university education
Summary
To keep people apart and ensure the sustainability of learning, governments implemented social distancing and self-isolation measures, which emptied campuses, causing students and faculty to work from home. This pandemic provoked a rapid shift to emergency forms of online learning among major education systems, institutions, faculty, and students. This crisis is one of the largest shocks to higher education in living memory. Every facet of higher education has been touched, from student wellbeing and characteristics, to campuses and global research, to faculty characteristics and work, to university funding and policy. The economic implications will ricochet for years, perhaps even signaling a new era for higher education and the communities that it serves
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