Don’t Reinvent the Wheel of Online Education: The Tools Are Already in the Toolbox by Cheryl Lentz, PH.D.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the rules for in-person learning. Some people believe education took a giant leap forward during the pandemic pause. The question is whether a true paradigm shift occurred—or merely the perception of one.

In the online world of higher education—an anomaly once thought to be a fad—remote learning gained credibility from necessity. Screens, cursors, messaging functions, and Wi-Fi connections created learning venues that had already been proven effective and were in the toolboxes of many educators. When solutions were needed because of shelter-in-place mandates for students, online education held the answers.

Online education could no longer stay in the shadows nor stay a kept secret, but the media continued to suggest that online education was a new toy to play with instead of being the well-established answer to allowing education to progress like it does in the community.

In the business landscape, corporations discovered that workers could be trusted to work at home and found cost savings in not paying overhead for buildings. Certainly not every job could shift to that model (hospitals, veterinary services, mechanics), yet in many cases, innovations arose via new delivery methods of services: telemedicine, pickup and delivery of cars for repair; restaurants, bars, and grocery chains offered curbside pickups or delivery service. Amazon was primed for already having a structure in place where they simply had to scale up, as the model already existed.

Higher education followed the Amazon model. There was no need to reinvent the wheel—all that was necessary was to scale up and invite more of the educational family to the party. Brick and mortar universities had to learn quickly how to operate during a pandemic. For example, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana led with innovation and safety to receive one of the lowest positive COVID-19 test results ratings in the country.

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, which serves over 33,500 students (11,000 in residence), transitioned their two different brick and mortar campuses (in Florida and Arizona) to online over one weekend with hardly a hiccup. How? They already had the online structure in place. Embry-Riddle’s online team took the scale-up opportunity to turn on one side of the educational model (online) as the other (brick and mortar) was temporarily turned off. Not a big deal because the university had the tools, the training, and the capacity to do so. Embry-Riddle didn’t have to build any new infrastructure; it was already built. What did not happen was the reinvention of the wheel. 

Other schools that did not prepare, that did not believe in the power of online education, were asleep at the wheel. There was no ease of transition, there was no system to scale up as there was no online system that existed. Administrators could not train that which they did not know. They had to learn on the job during the crisis as it was happening. Why? Failure to plan. Failure to put new tools in the old toolbox, tools that had existed for more than 20+ years.

So, a paradigm shift has happened in education. Some schools were prepared for changes caused by the pandemic. Most were not—but by now, everyone knows the answer: online learning is a necessary tool at every level of education, in a pandemic and beyond.

Dr. Cheryl, The Academic Entrepreneur, is known globally for her writings on leadership and failure, as well as on critical and refractive thinking. She has been published more than 44 times with 25 writing awards. As an accomplished university professor, speaker, and consultant, she is an international best-selling author, and a top-quoted publishing professional on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. See her TEDx Talk, Farndale2020, October 10, 2020. www.DrCherylLentz.com