Abstract:

The learning-teaching experiences during the covid-19 pandemic might transform higher education in a lot of countries. The pandemic showed that social and economic inequalities lead to inequality in learning and to student desertion [1]. Private schools have suffered economically and a lot of them will close forever while public schools have continued their activities online the best they can. The pandemic showed that online education can be a useful tool which can save resources to teach only some groups of students [1]. Some degrees have been easier to teach online and others could be taught only partially. It could be that future smaller campuses with less in-person professors, administrative workers and students flourish in some countries. Administrative workers could work in the future at their homes, reducing the expenses on utilities and the physical space needed in the higher education institutions at the same time that administrative processes get more automated. Some schools in the future could just build the necessary infrastructure for laboratories and workshops. The expensive golden university bureaucracy [2] could be greatly reduced if physical enrollments in schools were smaller. However, presently, there are issues for greatly advancing virtual education, like the lack of resources of students and teachers for online activities (like economic resources, physical appropriate space in their homes, and others), the degree curricula, the training of professors in virtual teaching, new labor relations in virtual teaching, academic evaluations for students and teachers, along with economic compensations, and healthcare plans for teaching and learning at home, among others. Virtual education will greatly advance in the coming years due to the integration of synchronous and asynchronous interaction technologies between the teachers and the students such as virtual reality, augmented reality, internet of things and 3-D designing. However, the benefits will not reach every student in the world, nor within a short period of time. Thus, scenarios are created starting with a diagnostics based on the national and international experiences during the pandemic and the identification of the most important variables to consider for the scenarios. Those variables are the advances in those interaction technologies, the economic affordability of hardware (computers, laptops and tablets), the accessibility and usefulness of virtual platforms to teach (such as zoom and google meets), the experiences during the pandemic, the impact of virtual education to the physical and mental health of students and teachers, the training of teachers, the selection of students for virtual classes, and the cost-benefit for public and private decision makers of virtual versus in-person education. Also, world events and government education policies which can propel virtual education are foreseen.

References:
[1] D.N. Dominguez-Perez, N. Dominguez-Vergara, From the lessons of coronavirus, a whole new world in education?, EDULEARN 2020 Proceedings, pp. 6412-6421, 2020.
[2] N. Dominguez-Vergara, D.N. Dominguez-Perez, Some impacts of covid-19 to higher education in Mexico, ICERI 2020 Proceedings, pp. 3691-3700, 2020.

Keywords:

Virtual education, higher education, covid-19.