The Next Normal

In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey pummeled the Houston region. Lone Star College - Kingwood campus, just north of the city, was ravaged — floodwater and sewage roared through the buildings, causing millions in damages. The disaster left the faculty and staff at LSC-Kingwood, with about a week to get the 600 classes that were supposed to meet at that campus online.

“So we had some experience” with rapid transition from on-premises to online classes, Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer, Link Alander, recalled in a recent interview. “But nothing like the scale of this year.”

Like many colleges and universities, Lone Star College extended its spring break this year before closing campus altogether because of the coronavirus pandemic. Preparing the entire system for remote learning and work kept the Lone Star College faculty and staff working long hours for weeks on end. “Seventy-nine hundred sections converted from face-to-face, on-prem at 20 locations to an online modality, while keeping the quality and keeping the students,” he explained. “In three weeks, the faculty and our LSC-Online team converted from face-to-face to online. And behind the scenes, of course, there were a billion other things happening.”

And still happening. Alander and his team, like their peers across the country, are now preparing for multiple scenarios, involving both on-site and online classes, amid day-to-day changes.

Since the start of the pandemic, Cisco, a network infrastructure and secure distance learning provider, has kept in close touch with its partners in higher education to both offer assistance and to learn from them. Every institution’s processes and experiences have been different, but some common threads have emerged. The schools best positioned to adapt quickly were those that had established an ecosystem of integrated technology that is:

scalable, for a sudden, dramatic increase in demand;
seamless, for rapid, widespread adoption, even by users with little or no experience with it;
and secure, to ensure continuity of all operations.

La Salle University in Philadelphia is another good example. In recent years the university had taken steps to improve its bandwidth and network security, among other functions, said Karl Horvath, Chief Information Officer.

“Additionally, we ran a big project on identity and access management, and single sign-on, which we didn't have before,” Horvath added. “So now that off-campus experience is a lot smoother. Instead of logging into four different websites, you've got one entry point, and it’s highly secure.

“In those two weeks in March that we pivoted to completely online, I was able to add a few more technology investments at the last minute. For example, we looked at a number of different technologies for remote access to computer labs or remote application delivery. We implemented found some free software initially to tide us over, and then settled on a couple different technologies that will help in the fall.”

Like Alander, Horvath is trying to be prepared for anything come August, when the campus re-opens.

“The university president wants all faculty to be ready to immediately transition to online if the pandemic rears its ugly head again,” he explained. “The focus now is preparing the on-ground experience, with social distancing. That means redesigning classrooms, identifying other spaces on campus [that?] can be configured to be used for instruction, and ensuring that there is technology where it’s necessary.”

But online instruction is just one challenge that institutions are facing. The sudden shift to remote work for administrative staff was, and remains, equally complex.

“We had the technologies in place, but the adoption was scattered,” said Alander of Lone Star College. “Now, chat functionality is spread across the system. We operate our service desk 24/ 7 in-house. And the self-service portal now has exceptional adoption. People go there to start their requests to search knowledge bases. That transition alone is going to help us in the future.”

A future, he stressed, far beyond the pandemic. This is another recurring theme in Cisco’s conversations with CIOs in higher education — the current crisis didn’t force change so much as accelerate change that was already under way (or should have been).

“COVID has forced the acceleration of digital transformation in very condensed timeframes for higher education. Our hope is that schools will take the best from what they’ve learned to permanently transform for the future,” says Renee Patton, Global Director of Education and Healthcare.

Cisco partners with many companies across the education ecosystem. One of those is Involvio, a partner that develops apps for student engagement and retention. Ari Winkleman, their founder, says, “Our products became mission critical overnight. We make the official app for colleges and universities around the world. And that official app became the primary communication vehicle for institutions to support their students.”

Involvio is now working on additional, pandemic-specific features, like symptom screening, exposure notification, density monitoring, and seat-booking for classrooms with limited capacity.

“Our customers have walked us through their reopen scenarios and asked us to deliver brand new features,” Winkleman explained. “And what we’ve realized is that the ‘next normal’ is actually what should be happening in higher ed anyway. A more data-driven approach to operating the campus is going to yield a more convenient and rewarding student experience.”

Involvio’s apps include survey tools, which Winkleman believes will be vital as students return to campus or resume online learning for the fall semester. It will be their first opportunity to assess and weigh in on their schools’ carefully laid plans for operating during the ongoing public health crisis.

“When students come back and start interacting with the next normal, their institutions are going have to have their eyes and ears wide open,” Winkleman said. “And they’re going to have to have the tools to iterate quickly. Because student experience is becoming a digital product. And our view is that all of these new tools will stick around long-term, and that’s good for students and institutions.”

Horvath agrees.

“The model of higher education is changing to a more full-service, immediate expectation and response model, and we need the systems and resources to be able to provide that level of service,” he said. “Higher ed has notoriously been behind the curve on some of these things, often because of cost. But we really need to get inventive and find partners to collaborate with.”

“We want higher ed to be ahead of the curve,” says Patton, “projecting future jobs and areas of study, and dynamically responding to effectively prepare students for whatever the future might hold.”