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The pandemic has challenged higher education institutions to move their courses online quickly. The varied status of each school prohibits a one-size-fits-all prescription for how to move forward. Extension Engine has created an Online Learning Response Team (OLRT) to work with schools with varying needs to define (and help execute) an efficient, holistic, adaptable approach to getting online. In this article, I describe our approach, highlight our work with two vastly different schools, and then provide a quick description of next steps to determine if this would work for you.

Institutions of higher education need to get their courses online. When this consists of 500, 1000, 5000, or more courses, it is clear that the institution’s efforts at supporting its faculty need to be targeted. In order to know where to direct its support efforts, school leadership needs to understand where it has its greatest exposure to risk in the transition from face-to-face to online. Extension Engine has recently helped a college go through the process of building a framework for assessing its own particular risk exposure and designing a survey to gather the information to help measure its risk exposure. We are currently helping them interpret that data and build a plan that responds to it.

Digital transformation is a long journey, one that we have helped several organizations navigate. The first steps are uncertain, the unknowns are many, but the potential payoff is large. Answers to the following questions can help you determine whether or not you’re ready to take those first steps. We run through these questions very early in the "getting to know you" stage with the project champion as a way for the potential client to learn how Extension Engine thinks about projects.

Schools are preparing to launch the Fall 2020 semester under a cloud of uncertainty over further COVID-related school closures. 13% of US higher ed institutions have announced that they will either be fully online (6%) or have proposed various hybrid models (7%). Students suffered through the hastily cobbled-together Zoom lectures when schools first closed but they will not want to continue college if the Fall semester was a repeat of the remote learning model of the second half of the Spring 2020 semester. 

The tragic killing of George Floyd and the events of the last few months have shone a spotlight on the disparate experiences of the Black community that have been marred by a culture of white supremacy and prejudiced systems and individuals. We know that these experiences are not new, and we know that change is long overdue. Now is the time for us to come together. Now is the time for us to speak up. Now is the time for action.