Today’s oracles are few and far between-but you do need the power of prophecy to keep a business afloat these days. Very few successful business folk are able to forecast the corporate weather right now, as the seas storm under a COVID-19 sky.
Just a few years ago when online learning lived on the periphery of the educational system, William Erbey advocated for undergraduates to spend a significant proportion of their time studying online.
Fast forward to the end of 2020 and the higher education sector internationally is reeling under the effects of COVID-19. According to Science Business Net, the US is the most vulnerable country in the world to the loss of foreign students, while the UK is in crisis, having exposed the limitations of its high tuition fee model.
According to SBN’s most recent report the crisis is showing people that there are many other options in blended learning and that high-quality content can be delivered remotely.
Graham Love, former chief executive of the Higher Education Authority of Ireland argues that many students will be asking why they should be paying tens of thousands of dollars to study in a foreign country, when they can stay at home and study online for a fraction of the price of traditional college education.
The American Enterprise Institute’s report on the challenges that coronavirus presents to American higher education, agrees that digital learning will become more commonplace out of necessity.
Interestingly, the report recommends that short-term modifications in course delivery, student services… and pricing fee structures will have to be converted into lasting reforms.
Indeed, it was that very point made by Bill Erbey long before the report was written. Together with his wife Elaine, Bill founded Scholarly.co, a hybrid institution melding online education with campus tuition. Erbey said that Scholary helps students find the right colleges and courses by utilizing broadcasting capability to deliver education online.
American universities are famously a national treasure, and by utilizing solutions such System73 – where students can interact in real-time with professors – colleges and universities can focus on delivering higher quality education at a significantly lower cost.
Erbey of course realizes that there will always be a need for physical presence in higher education but predicted before COVID-19 that online education would become a significant part of the mix.
Advocating a combination of on-campus and online provisioning, Erbey explained that by utilizing international students and online learning, universities can fill empty seats with full tuition, generating revenue to settle the costs of a college education.
In an acclaimed article in the U.K.’s Lancet magazine, its authors warn that the COVID19 pandemic has both propelled the research and higher education sectors to the forefront of public attention. Whilst laboratory capacity has been crucial for diagnostic testing for COVID19, experts in infectious diseases are central to national policy.
Now more than ever since the Corona pandemic, and the effects of lockdown, travel freezing and social distancing, colleges and universities are offering an open-shut-open policy of further education dependent on the stringencies of the individual country.
According to Erbey, online education is vastly cheaper than sending them to a ‘Hilton hotel’ for four years. This highlights the fact that in the old model many undergraduate students will be in debt and are therefore unlikely to pay off their loans. Erbey is advocating for a fresh look and if COVID did anything, it forced the educational establishment to think differently about education.
William Erbey may not be the Delphic Oracle, but he’s always ahead of the crowd.
