Craving Real Learning?

 

What is a university? A set of buildings and grounds, or an opportunity to gain knowledge and skills, and share widely?

Judging from my students’ comments about their online learning experience in the pandemic, the majority cannot wait to be back on campus. Some have never even seen the university and want to see it as soon as possible. While eager to engage online in a multitude of ways, they crave physical interaction and university social life generally. They are starry-eyed about the prospect of getting back to “normal”. In the past fall semester, only a quarter of my students felt their online learning was “real” as opposed to virtual – and in the spring semester, even fewer did. Will these same students yearn for the flexibility of the online environment once back in class, one wonders? Will some even demand online sections of their own? It is hard to tell at the moment, but what is clear is that higher education will not be the same after Covid-19.

A Vice Dean at a Moroccan university, Dr Jamal Eddine Benhayoun, has rightly noted, “There is no better time for rethinking the idea and future of higher education than today, as the world seems to have realised that universities matter the most not as buildings but as global networks for the production and exchange of skills and ideas.” Going beyond that, he coined the term NGU – New Global University – for a vision of the best institutions of higher education merging online, regardless of place and culture, allowing open access to high quality learning across the world.

AUB is also changing. As with many other institutions of higher education, learning at AUB will still generally center around face-to-face interaction in the short term, but it will gradually allow for more online opportunities with time. Perhaps people are realizing that, for example, learning to construct a building may be more important than which building you happen to be in at the time.