In this episode, Phil Hill, Jeanette Wiseman, and Kevin Kelly discuss the an overlooked aspect of the COVID response from higher education. Beyond traditional face-to-face models, and fully online models, there is a vast middle ground of hybrid – the combination of face-to-face and online components. Added this is the concept of Hybrid Flexible as shared in in this blog post.

Hosts:

* Phil Hill* Jeanette Wiseman* Kevin Kelly

Transcription:

Phil: Welcome,

everyone. It’s great to talk again. And it’s been an interesting week and a

half since we did our pilot episode to work out the podcast issues. And here we

are, yet another week into the shutdown. How are you guys holding up?

Jeanette: Doing

pretty good, I think. I’m surprised that I just realized this marks the sixth

week that my kids have been out of school, which seems fast and slow at the

same time. But, you know, I think that there’s some maybe sadness that sort of

kicking in at the end of your school year. Things are happening, but also just

a level of comfort of being home as well. It’s kind of a mixed bag at the

Wiseman the household. How about you, Kevin?

Kevin: I think my

big problem is I don’t give myself time in a regular circumstance.

And, you know, I’m working on a book about online teaching

right now that we’re trying to get to the publisher. Every free moment that I’m

not on a Zoom call or doing work for a client is spent doing some other form of

work.

Even yesterday, I worked all day. Really nothing has changed

much except for not as much business travel.

Phil: But as for

myself, I’m the same way trying to deal with a lack of business travel and

wishing my family the best in the meantime. Today, what we wanted to talk about

is that it seems like there’s been a pretty broad consensus since we last

talked that the Fall 2020 academic term in the Northern Hemisphere in

particular is now really looking to be in question, that it’s not at all safe

to just assume that schools will be back to their normal method of delivery

where they’re free to do fully face to face with no restrictions for the fall.

And I’ve definitely noticed a pretty strong recognition of

this point, and that’s led to some interesting conversations.

But one thing I’m noticing that isn’t being discussed enough

is hybrid education and the possibility of a partial reopening situations,

where a school, certain parts of their activity can be done face to face, but

certain parts are going to need to be online.

And the challenge of trying to figure out what is the right

mix for a school to take, particularly given the fact that there are still so

many unknowns about what the reopening are going to look like. And that’s

something I’d like to explore in more depth today. But before we get started on

what schools are doing, I’d like to check in with both of you.

Have you what have you noticed with the online public

commentary or are you noticing the same trend about online versus face to face

and not enough about hybrid or what are you guys seeing?

Kevin: It’s only

just starting to hit the list serves I frequent in terms of people start...