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The pandemic has challenged higher education institutions to move their courses and services online quickly. However, despite the vaccine rollout, schools still face unique challenges heading into the fall semester, including providing faculty support, ensuring student success, and minimizing risk.

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.

At the Association of American Colleges & Universities Annual Meeting, Dr. Cynthia Kosso (the provost at Moravian College) and I gave a presentation titled “Building Online Capacity at a Liberal Arts College.” In this post I will share some quotes from the 60-minute presentation — giving  you the real-world perspective of a liberal arts college that has successfully embarked on the journey to online learning. 

There is an evergreen debate in higher education about outsourcing: Which services and capabilities are appropriate to trust to a third party, and which are not?