The Next Generation of Online Higher Education

hello everybody i'm frederick i'm the associate dean for academic affairs here at uc berkeley global and i'm super excited to welcome everybody we have people from around the world tuning in so greetings to you all it's very exciting to welcome you to our sixth episode or edition of our pnam berkeley horizons discussion remotes this is our first for this year so happy new 2021 to everybody in the hopes that everything will be better than 2020 and we can quickly move on from this weird year we had last year but there's still some things that changed very fundamentally last year and i'm very happy to be with a fantastic panel today and notably also again with our colleague john michelle from the num um to discuss about online higher education how this is going to impact or change joe michelle thank you frederick so hello to everybody so i should say good morning good evening uh i'm john michelle i'm chair marketing professor at uh at nam and as mentioned by frederick i'm very pleased to be with you and sharing this this session uh with new friends i would say um as mentioned by frederick where the world is facing many challenges and and we are in in a global complex situation we've been working and trying to develop partnership with with berkeley for our mba program organizing a study trip working on project management trying to develop study trip from u.s students to paris everything is a bit jeopardized i would say by by covid so we keep the project and then beginning of last year when when the first lockdown took place we took that as an opportunity to to to build up those discussion between i would say uh u.s academic and professional european academic and professional so as mentioned by frederick this is the sixth edition previously we've been discussing about uh i would say marketing uh chaos management strategy innovation agile management and our discussion of today will be about evolution of higher education we've got two new friends two new panelists so maybe you can present yourself and then we will jump into discussion sharon thank you i'm sharon doyle i'm the assistant dean at uc berkeley global i'm really excited to be here today i've been at berkeley since 2012. i first started there running a science department that had a lot of traditional classes but also online courses and that's where my personal interest in online education began um we've obviously learned a lot in the last year and so i think this is a really timely discussion on how we're all planning to move forward so again just very excited to be here today thank you thank you novella good evening i'm dario paraskev vice provost for business environment and student life in bucharest university of economic studies the biggest university in business and economics public administration in central eastern europe and i'm also associate professor in different years in world bank institute where at vienna paris business school in clan paris thank you dory frederick these did you to ask me a question isn't it is thank you all for for being here with us well we thought we'd kick it off uh as it is 2021 um with the perspective on the positive so why not start right now and think about online education and think about the positive opportunities that we are actually looking at because we have one of these key elements in this uh partnership is this discussion um across the atlantic so um john michelle what would be your um opportunities that you see for online education after covert from a western european perspective thank you as you mentioned we're trying to have a let's say a new perspective and this is the aim of this type of of discussion when we started with uh with once again cow strategy so now if we look at uh our industry uh uh the global industry higher education uh i would say if we step back and look that look at it like an industry our business is environment is drastically changing i would say our let's say audience the student profile are also changing i would say very fast including because of uh kovid on the french market european market uh we have a lot of pressure to make sure that what you learn is useful for for your work it's not only education it's also you're working on your employability i would say uh your ability to jump uh into uh to find your first job and later on to to stay in play uh when working and the environment is very fast changing moocs have been impacting the environment uh online online videos access to content is is all over the place and even let's say from an employee point of view and maybe from a company point of view you don't look at the resume the same way you don't look at your only your academic degree you look at what is your career path and what are the different let's say knowledge acquisition you had or you will be you're forecasting throughout your your work so your resume looks very uh different and you know from scratch that uh you will go back to school so this is a great opportunity for online education because you your foundation will be your your your let's say first school you first university or first institution but you will go back to school and you will have opportunity to to to go not only to academic institutions a google certificate or linkedin certificate sounds very good if you're if you are doing marketing so i would say the audience is changing um the distribution of our business is changing and of course now the content the core business is changing also because we've got to adapt our let's say education or what we what we let's say our service uh to the new audience and just like in other industry the development of the brand will be bigger the the student what you call the student experience from let's say the recruitment to what you experience during your stay at the school and your alumni experience will be will be different so i would say the the big change big opportunity to adapt in this environment um in france there is a strong let's say relationship of battle between the public private between the universities and what we call grants they call so the game is very i would say open and there are many opportunities but one common point and we're going to be brief one common point is that we go for international connection and many european students have been educated using era smooth opportunities traveling uh into uh european through european country and broadly uh discovering the world so it will remain this this will to go as soon as we can travel again as soon as we can connect again there will be opportunities uh to to go back to international connections on the french market the state is very influenced influencing this business uh the ability to finance your your studies is is uh there and there are many ways now that you go back to school uh using the the it is a funding that you you made out of your work experience um opportunities for education we'll talk later on and i would say then i will stop on my first intro that it's a great opportunity for new business models opportunity for new learning opportunity for new educational experience so let's be optimistic and jump into the future isn't what it you think from from the u.s

perspective sharon in terms of opportunities for online education i think there's a lot of room for growth and i think it's really exciting because um even though there was a lot of online education in the u.s prior to 2020 and it was working well there was a lot of hesitancy on the side of students and instructors and in you know march of 2020 we were all forced to go online and i think that opened a lot of eyes to the fact that that this can work and i know in the us we were really um excited about seeing how ins creative our instructors instructors were and how much they collaborated together to work through spring 2020 which was just a very tough situation for so many people and we learned there are new ways to deliver online education that works for a broader group of students and we want to now look at how that's been used not only through spring but summer and fall of 2020 and move forward again i think what this will lead to is an increase of format options in the future it won't just be in person or one type of online course there's now going to be many different things we've learned new ways of delivering the content we've learned new tools and technologies and i think we're just starting to really see the potential thank you dora what do you think from eastern europe perspective what are the opportunities that you're seeing um in my university and in my country in romania it was a huge push in march 2020 to move from face-to-face courses to online courses hopefully we developed previously a platform for helping us because we had some courses delivered already in hybrid module but it forced us to change our way of teaching from one day to another and to implement new teaching methods in a very short delay just because the big picture of higher education changed completely when the kovid arrived in romania so it was a decision to go 100 online and we moved all our courses online using existing platforms we developed within the university but also already consecrated platforms such zoom and google meet this change in university landscape was overposing with a need we had to adapt our academic curricula to business environment and to offer courses which are requested by the market and we work with our advisory board in order to adapt our educational offer to what the company needs so in fact what we try to develop we develop a totally different new learning experience for our student all the courses were delivered mainly online and the decision it's still going on uh for this semester uh we also offer them courses online uh but it's a discussion what will happen after this pandemic because we think that we should have a hybrid uh model uh in uh in front of us so this is from uh bucharest university of economic studies perspective but also it's a big picture for romania because all the universities took the same decision from one day to another it's actually very interesting because i i'm thinking a lot about the kind of even international perspective i was very engaged in international partnerships obviously over the last uh years or anything before covet hit and with the new kind of opportunities that you also just described in in online what struck me perspective is the perspective of the student is if i'm a student anywhere in the world now i can either go to my local institution because that's where where classes are offered but at the same time i can also now go and and go to any type of institution in the world i really like the choice for me is is totally open as long as i'm able to converse or speak in the language that um whatever the classes are delivered in so it's interesting from an international perspective for the student the choice is much larger now and i think the key difference is what you just described doral is actually that the companies themselves have changed their perspectives on education they have maybe looked closer at it and actually realized in many cases that you can be and become very proficient when you learn online it doesn't mean that you are have a lesser education or lesser degree it is very much the same so if that's the case the companies accept it we have seen grad schools accept online education fully so if degrees and certifications are now fully accepted even if they're delivered online it's a fantastic opportunity for students worldwide and for us as institutions it makes us kind of think of okay so how do we need to continue working forward because suddenly we are competing not just regionally locally we're really competing quote-unquote globally and that's why i think actually our collaboration with with our institutions here is very interesting because it means we are maybe ahead ahead of this already we are not thinking about competing against each other but maybe seeing how we can collaborate even more effectively together so we really agree with you frederick especially when what we noticed throughout this discussion is that the the company the business environment is fast changing so education has to adapt very quickly uh in order to fit to let's say the new needs and so on and and as you mentioned it might be an opportunity for us at the same time quite a lot of challenges i would say yeah actually maybe you want to jump in what are the challenges you think we are facing um maybe a question to all of us now that we talked about all the opportunities um it's it's not all a given what do you think are the the main challenges on from your perspective that we are we're facing jeremy do you wanna we're gonna find a new tempo i would say because as you mentioned uh um we were forced to react very quickly and uh as mentioned by dorell my institution went 100 online and and we we found ways to organize the courses to take the exam to recruit online so we we've seen uh that it was it's a big change but now we've got to find what is the new balance what is the new we mentioned that very frequently what is the new normal and and then it's kind of a change management topic on how do we adapt uh all our courses not only for temporary change before an ongoing situation and this is what we are designing right now and that's why it's interesting to discuss also with other institutions because we don't have all the same point of view uh some professors would rather go back to let's say traditional face to face and others would jump into a hundred percent online and as mentioned by dorel previously we are debating of about what what is the new normal and we'll come back to the educational topic uh later on uh but definitely the the challenge is how do we adapt how do we adapt from a teaching point of view from let's say a back office point of view if we take a let's say a traditional approach uh how do we build up our partnership a bit differently and the challenge is also to to keep what we discussed uh or when preparing this session but we can all react on this topic how do we remain human when we educate not only to have an online experience but to have a transmission experience blending soft skills and knowledge and many challenges so in this case sorry i i was just going to add i think um we also have to realize that while there are lots of best practices and a lot of a lot of instructors rose to the challenge we need to continue to support instructors um all the instructors you know it really was a difficult pivot for people um and if we can provide the right resources then we will have high quality across the board and i think that's going to be critical with the partnerships as well and sharing best practices between the different partners so that students have a similar experience another thing um you know sometimes students have different experiences with what their expectations of an online class are in terms of the material as well as what they need to put into it and i think that is evolving and something that needs to be standardized um and then the last thing i wanted to point out is just i think we all need to give pause and think about you know the fact that we're providing more access but there are still barriers for people and i think we should be really cognizant of that not everyone has an internet access a computer and a private place to study and as we are really excited about all these opportunities if there are ways that we can continue to bring everyone into the fold i think we'll be better off in romania and in our university in view or analyzing these aspects we started a project called restart romania to get closer to the business environment and we discovered that companies are now trying to relocate their production to do some near shoring instead of offshoring to shorten their supply chain so we quickly adapt and introduce new topic in our curriculum especially international business especially in supply chain in order to help also our partners and our companies to our uh uh partners in business to also to uh have let's say an easier adaptation to the new uh business model so in fact our biggest challenge is uh on the one way due to the fact that we we have to reinvent the business model for the university and this business model should be also adapted to the business environment to our also to our partners so in fact the picture it's more complicated because on the one side we have the students with their experience and the learn and learning uh uh experience and on the other hand we have our partners with their needs so this is let's say the role of our executive board and our advisory board to to define the best strategy and to adapt our academic offer in order to fulfill these needs so this is why we consider that this period is unique it's a period that we didn't have in 2030s or in other periods we have when we had such economic crisis and um this crisis gave us the opportunity to reshape our business model and to reshape our offer to get closer to our partners and to to to maintain and to have a stronger relationship with our partners also foreign partners in international relations to develop common products so in fact it's full of challenges from the university perspective it's actually quite interesting we had similar effects or i mean we see it with our partnership is that actually the online has brought people closer together because if everybody is in the groove of having meetings all day basically through zoom or other platforms you can interact very quickly so it actually has in some ways enhanced maybe the the potential of collaboration compared to before where we thought we have to meet in person one quick follow-up to this type of topic of challenges that i wanted to make because i'm i'm looking at the questions in the um in the q a and there were two questions that were asking like a thing that's really tough for all i think higher education institutions that have a lot of let's say physical real estate is about the tuition fees um the the fact i mean you know the us is is leading the world in terms of uh student debt um there there are tuition fees in in many programs sometimes the the governments carry but it's it's a lot of money even if the company sorry the state is paying for students uh the money comes from the taxpayers so education is pretty expensive and there there is this understanding or seeming understanding i think from the student side and the public side that if it's online now it should be cheaper so um i don't know if you i think that's an interesting thing for you if you could react to that that challenge of people perceiving it should be cheaper but seemingly it's not this is i would say this is part of the discussion we are having right now how do we adapt or i would say our pricing how do we adapt the content of our courses uh in order to as mentioned previously to to reshape part of our business model uh i'm very aligned with what we said previously that uh we need to be agile this is more or less a finding also the findings of our previous session our i would say our audience the business environment is changing so we've got to to to adapt very quickly and and the format of what we'll deliver won't be the same so so it's really a great opportunity opportunity i would say from a let's say a development standpoint to revisit what we we are uh uh let's say proposing uh to our uh future students and uh and to our partners and so on and and this is the discussion which is taking place right now and it's it's once again it's an opportunity but of course we will come to the topic of the institution later on are we agile enough for the new environment and this is certainly a a big topic we are facing right now [Music] i would add for cost in my experience it's it's not less expensive to run an online course in many cases it's more there's a lot of technology that goes into creating animations and and you know things other than just lecturing students um and so i think maybe the more students take online courses they realize that there's more involved and that will be less of a challenge um i don't think it's less i think it's it's a different in some cases it's more um but you know i think from the student perspective they're not uh commuting they don't have to move so there are other types of savings that that they should consider when thinking about the cost of online yeah correct and we still also they will see the benefits i would say uh because you don't have to to cross the city and to commute and so on because you plug and you're you're part of the game and also uh you we we'll talk about opportunities uh for let's say content but uh inviting people from the business environment is very easy you you ask them to be part of the of the course and they can share their experience their testimony and so on this is the same fall it is a defense when you've got a final presentation at the mba level uh the tutor will be there the academic jury will be there but the let's say the mentor in the company can can take part of uh to to to the discussion and then we can have let's say another more meaningful usage of our let's say contact hours and students definitely can benefit from it i really agree in romania being a state-owned university founded in 1913 we have most of our students who do not pay taxes we charge only a few of them so the problem of um let's say taxes is not a key issue in our university uh however we do we do huge investment in digitalization and in creating new teaching tools in order to help because these new methods of teaching mainly on online need a lot of resources and need a lot of movies a lot of animation a lot of background preparation before coming in front of our students so in our long term perspective the investments are specially done in digitalization and investing in digital learning products and films and animation so this is a let's say a new optic uh the pandemic brought in our in our vision to have more and more digital tools to help us for our teaching so basically the the thing is at the end of the day the online is is not really cheaper it has different costs it is it is not uh cheaper than than producing things um in person and on top of it i mean i guess the you alluded to your institution be very being very established it's not like many institutions can just get rid of their real estate we're not just going to sell all of our buildings and stop teaching in classroom as well so effectively i think maybe there's an opportunity going forward to um how to say use the online format if there are if there are any more cost effective ways of of educating to do that in addition to what we're doing already um and i think actually there were attempts with edx coursera and and similar um examples where there was a move towards can we do something more cost efficient um to be honest one thing that i observed with since covet is that a lot of the what we tried to do in terms of low cost very accessible was also not how to say that attractive for learners as as is for example a life online course or very well developed um asynchronous courses you were just describing dora with without high media production and so on so at the end of the day it's um to the questions that the the audience asked it's not really looking good in terms of just being cheaper and online equals cheap um at the end of the day maybe that's also not so bad because that might have been one of the reasons why corporations and grad schools and so on realize that online education is not subpar it's not lesser than the in-person education um if we think about maybe that specific sorry you want to do i'm just jumping into reacting to your comment when preparing this meeting we already had the discussion about what would be the new normal and what would be let's say the new balance and so on my perception is that it's a bit early to fully uh know what will be the future but we are in the transition phase and uh and what we know is that they definitely uh we are looking for balance we are looking for balance because when i look at the picture behind you about the let's say berkeley campus i i wish i i will i feel like going there and enjoying let's say a lovely experience in california this is the same for us at vietnam our foreign students when they come to france they want to have an experience outside of their own environment so they are willing to pay for something which is let's say accessible affordable online up to a certain extent but with a proper balance in terms of experience added value so this is under construction i would say uh we are when we are state universities or when we are let's say up to a certain extent protected by the market we we can adapt and react with an okay tempo i'm discussing with some of my colleagues in in private schools right now the challenge is very tough because the situation is very critical let's say from an economical point of view lucky enough in some environment we say okay we've got to adapt we know that the future won't be the same but we've got time for us and we are we will be able to make the best out of previous past and uh and under the potential of technology in our education and this is what we are experiencing right now and the teachers are looking for their new balance i would say they are experiencing right now a new teaching approach they find their new balance using uh lms platform just like moodle or or online tools just like those one i would say they feel more more comfortable i would say right now they adapt to this environment but they are still searching for for the new balance and i would say this is the same for our students that's actually a big question maybe for all of us um how do you think the pedagogy will evolve and in going forward because so there are some questions in the in that are coming in about um but universities were built to create interaction to create contact like the it's not just the classroom it's it's what around it is around it that that doesn't really transpire necessarily in the in the online as we know it maybe um there is issues um like the isolation effect that students might have um i think this is things we are all concerned with and working on from an aspect of developing the pedagogy what do you think all of you how the what do we think the how the pedagogy will evolve basically going forward i'll say i think the biggest issue is not thinking about this process as taking an in-person course and just putting it online it's really thinking about the experience and how to adapt and i think we will not only learn a lot from the instructors but also instructional designers remember we have a whole class of professionals who think about this they have traditionally put more effort i think into asynchronous but now putting it all together i think they will help administrators and instructors figure out how to engage students in this model of zoom versus animation and discussion panel i mean the fact that they can do that in an asynchronous course is amazing so i think this is in some ways even easier challenge but it's also a really exciting one i mean i can tell you at berkeley we have had students say i know my instructor my online instructor better than i did my instructors in person now that's rare but it's possible and so i think thinking really hard again not just about translating from one format to the other but using the technology and the the pedagogy and just taking it to a new place yeah um i will come up with a new perspective speaking on you about this new pedagogy in fact we should bring into our discussion the cultural aspect in romania we are a latin culture and we prefer more and more to socialize to be face to face to be on campus and as john michelle said our students appreciate a lot also their life in university campuses which means we should bring our students from different regions and also in future i am positive that even if we have a hybrid model students will enjoy to come and to spend some collaborative working in our campuses and to deliver projects together in different teams especially in mixed teams we try we tried this model with our mba programs for already 10 years with john michelle with our students in bucharest and paris and now we also try to extend our program to some other culture so i think we should also take into account when we design new pedagogy tools and new pedagogy thinking also our culture because it's surely divorce but the cultural aspects are to be taken into account maybe you conduct some studies also to see which are the preferences of our students and how we can we find the best proportion between online courses asynchronous teaching and face-to-face teaching and of course working together in university campus i fully agree with you darrell when sharon is mentioning the the link with the let's say teachers professors you don't open the door give your course and close the door you are connected so this connection is an opportunity to to to engage to have a discussion to talk about what you gain what you learn but also to to to raise questions about your career paths and so on so we can reinforce this link and even when we are discussing about uh organizing our study trip for this year um very challenging to say okay we will be able to go to uh to california in july 2021 and this is the same for us going to romania with a group of students we can look at this event with a kind of an online preparation if feasible we will go there and we will visit your place and we will be happy happy to connect but if not possible we will adapt and we will be able to to build up teamwork to have projects to to make virtual online visits of company and so on and there are opportunities that's why i that's why i'm talking about piloting experimenting out of it to find what is the next uh let's say what will be the next opportunities in in the it's future quite interesting it reminds me of things that we are doing where we're we're just trying to focus on the students mostly and what is most efficient for them because if we just assume we are classroom we just do classroom and that's that but that might actually not be 100 the best solution um fully online uh is is one thing but that's maybe also not the best solution and so if i take together what you were just describing it seems that going forward it's about figuring out maybe guided by the student needs particularly what is it that we can offer best and that might be for some people the fully online maybe even asynchronous for other people they hybrid and hybrid can be not just part of the course online and part of the course in class but there might be entire programs that are a big part online and then they have residential programs as you just described to michelle and then some people that really are looking and maybe that's dependent also on the subject area to be really in class i mean um i think there are examples um labs and so on you just can't really mix together chemicals or or grow cell cultures and petri dishes in virtual environments i mean you can simulate it but yeah and the other dimension as as discussed by doral is that um we take that as an opportunity to reshape the world and maybe to fix the world up to a certain extent uh because a lot of discussions are taking place right now about uh do we re locate relocate part of our health labs or whatever in europe a bit differently because we were stuck without the proper products and so on so the supply chain is being changed the distribution is being changed and the other dimension is that even the company don't look at the future the same way so profit is there but purpose is very important and key companies just like that and many important companies on the french market uh which have a global influence are revisiting their strategy to to to adapt their new attitude and it started much earlier it started before kovid of course but now it's a must go in terms of alignment between what we claim and what we do and climate change is a reality uh impact of industry a footprint of what we do is is a reality then we need to do something so the content of our courses have to adapt and we've got to revisit what we've been teaching for years in terms of supply chain business models vision and so on to to at least investigate new opportunities of doing business differently and this is great let's say from an academic point of view because it's not a copy and paste content-wise it's a new page and it's something that we've got to revisit and that we've got to design and we know that the solution is not local and we know that the solution for many topics is global so how do we connect how do we work how do we uh educate in order to to to reshape part of our environment and to fix some of the issues we are facing not only of course from a pandemic point of view but from let's say broadly a business impact point of view so this is very optimistic i would say because it's a huge challenge and from enough for academic people it's a great opportunity to do to write something different i can give a little a little spoiler maybe to inspire colleagues that might hear from might be here from higher education institutions and it hasn't been revisited yet here locally but there was several years ago an initiative within the san francisco bay area where all major institutions were thinking of offering a degree that students could take by taking courses from any of the participating institutions as well as i think four or five different leading universities sorry and it didn't work and one of the reasons is even though it's in the same area like you don't want to travel or you can't travel around an hour two hours from one to the other between classes basically to do this now if you reimagine this this is actually pretty powerful to think about that you can offer programs now where you have a consortium of universities working together and students being able to take classes that are mutually recognized and they can then tie uh take classes from the institution or the the faculty that they think makes most sense for them and institutions can be very deliberate in saying well this is where we shine we have this particular strength and we partner with others that have complementary strengths there so it's actually quite exciting in terms of design of programs even if we as you said just said we go beyond the structure um that we usually have and that's actually maybe going into into a topic we i thought we can talk about as well as kind of the strategies of higher education institutions going forward um maybe then a question to us to all of us and to you what do you think will be the major changes in terms of the strategy that we are we're going to drive who wants to start you want me to start uh i can say a few words about uh nam of course i'm part of let's say the academic team and we are interacting with management our provost and about the vision this is under construction because there are two dimensions on one side we take that as an opportunity to build up our local network and to be closer to our audience because you can learn locally so you need the touch point i would see i would say to be to be local and then you can be online up to a certain extent but you want the social interaction as mentioned by dorael so your network might be a blend of let's say social network broadly but also local network and so on so on one side we we developed the distribution i would say very locally this is true also from an international standpoint and on the other side we need to be more industrial to if i if i may say in this way we need to make sure that the back office is strong enough from a nighty point of view in order to be robust to be powerful to be online to be efficient to be safe to be a cyber protected and so on so the the the resources the central resources need to be reinforced up to a certain extent and it's an opportunity as you mentioned from an academic point of view to make sure that you connect with your colleagues uh to make sure that you get what what's very great in this particular course uh that you want to integrate so the blend is under construction i would say we are blending what we can do from an academic point of view and behind that uh the the business model is a key word because we know that the economy will won't be the same and we know that we've got to realign uh our economy and to also maintain what we mentioned previously the access to education uh because the the next few years will be challenging from it's a work environment point of view the crisis will be there so we need to make sure that we remain affordable and accessible and one example we've lowered some of our rate our mba has been is more affordable it was already very affordable but we we reduce the price in order to make sure that you give access uh to to uh most of the potential students i would say so i'll i'll add to that um obviously partnerships we've all been talking about that is is a big part of how we're going to move forward and as frederick mentioned you know having areas of specialty that one institution can focus focus on and partner is is really important not only for content but i think also for the delivery what we found so far is you know the way that you run an online course in science is very different from the way you run an online course in business so we can specialize in that aspect as well and then learn from each other so i think that's really powerful um and then one thing i think i wanted to mention is you know as far as resources go we're talking about education that is very different from a mooc moocs are great to get broad uh information out to the public but it is a very different animal from what we're all talking about um it's we have to prove competency right if we're really talking about education whether it's a pre-grad or you know students taking courses for college credit or into graduate school and i think that makes it a lot more complex and we need to to think about those those challenges as we as we partner as well academic integrity standards and things of that nature and quality monitoring is key also how do you monitor the quality of what you let's say display broadcast and so on just to make sure that the return on investment is there from the student point of view but the efficiency in terms of acquisition is there and it's not easy and it can go up to into details just like do we have the camera online when we give the course when preparing this session we are the small debate between us about what should be let's say the new rule should be will be all of us online and of course not everybody is equal in terms of access to the fiber on broadband and so on so we don't know exactly what is the proper solution for that but we are once again piloting for it yeah if we speak we speak about let's say local strategies for higher education i think that this pandemic crisis gave us the opportunity to get closer to our students and our partners national and international partners and i totally agree with sharon i do not think we'll develop moocs program we'll go more in let's say a customized program the bachelor program could be the same even in romania we have some agreements to exchange students and to recognize their mutual recognition but for master programming especially for mba programs we can deliver content which is more linked to local leads so in fact this new teaching paradigm will help us to develop content which is more and more adapted to the clients to companies need but also the student needs and in this respect i think we can increase the mobility of our students we can increase their exposure to new situation we can increase also multiple multicultural teams in working different projects so all in all i think that we have a different range of opportunities we can use in coming years in order to have a proper academic offer for for our students so i am quite optimistic uh regarding the strategy for for coming years for higher education as john michelle said it's a completely new picture we should just revisit what we did before we should just revisit what are the best strategies for companies and try to work together to develop the best design for our courses what's very complex dory from my point of view is to find the proper balance between to make it short a b2c distribution and a b2b distribution because the b2b is very customized depending on this is a company needs the size of the company and so on but this is a great way let's say to recruit our students and to make sure that we have the critical size for a particular study track and so on at the same time we've got to remain b2c oriented because people want to move from one to company and then at the end of the day they are their own let's say driver of their career paths and we've got to adapt all the all the the broadcast of our programs uh so i mean our crm platform which must be much more powerful the content must be dynamic this is not this is a program this is a menu and this is what you get to get the degree at the end of one one year of two years and so on so we've got drastically to adapt and this transition is a huge challenge in terms of uh not only academic profile but also uh back office support functions in order to to to be ready for for the future so the closer you are from technology and and this is part of the discussion we had previously discussing with berkeley team the bay area is is obviously a very let's say a technology-oriented environment so it's positive but in many cases we've got to adapt and find the proper solution with our technology uh at nam at and so on and one point that you mentioned also previously is that your brand ase academic uh studies uh uh is a well-known brand it's a very i see very strong brand so we can capitalize on your brand on clam brand on other brands berkeley and so on and this is a new opportunity but the design of the offer and the distribution has to be reshaped and must be more agile because you can customize more quickly the program and so on it's actually interesting if you think it through i mean if you want to be provocative they are going to probably be if you what you were just saying like with this kind of global stage through online education if you several categories if you are an institution that is kind of really world leading and you have the brand that you just alluded to you are probably now uh as a strategy engaging in kind of a arms race with the other top institutions of who is going to take the biggest market share globally because assuming that people have a good internet connection and so on in places around the world now everybody can get a degree from a top institution as long as they are academically good enough and and they make it into the into through the admissions process but in theory they can do that wherever they are so if that's possible and it's recognized by companies um globally those different brands then it's just a question of who's going to be the fastest to capture most of these these students because those revenues that you will generate through this will allow you to be that much stronger in marketing and taking the market presence the bigger question is then for all the institutions that are not in the top world leading or regionally leading what what happens to those institutions when you have students that that have the choice they can go to my local institution can take online classes there um maybe also some in-person classes or i do like a full online with with that other brand um and it's it's going to be tough i think for for those institutions as well to figure out how is their place being impacted in the entire system in the u.s you see articles coming out of um kind of this monopolization of the higher education industry where really i don't know in two decades there will be i don't know 50 100 big brands and that's it and that will they will eat up the entire market and everything else would be subsidiaries or local spaces so it's quite interesting to consider i don't know if you have seen things on your end that would point toward this already uh or what the dynamics are in europe notably as well if i'm allowed i think that in fact the the speed of transformation is very high and what you mentioned frederick the fact that we should uh completely uh see the the new the new transformation uh the biggest challenge is the fact that we should be very agile and we should do this in a let's say high speed there is there is no time to wait and see what is happening we should jump in and we should try to redesign our business model with our partners otherwise um it's it's a complicated story so it's it's it's a it's a matter of transformation of business model for universities but also for companies but also a matter of agility and of speed of delivering hybrid education incorporates the coverage we will be has will be global i would say so i shouldn't take this example but uh the airlines the airlines are fully down right right now no business nobody and so on but their model is a model of alliances of partners partnership in order to cover the world and to make sure that you you can fly from from australia to the states and so on so the future of our business is certainly a matter of alliances partnership the consolidation is underway consolidation will will take place uh and it's a great opportunity for the public institution because they remain affordable the the the time is over or it's very tough for some institution to be still skyrocketing in terms of uh of pricing because the re return on investment is not that secure uh you you can spend a lot of time to to pay your studies so the the the market will certainly be an affordable market with strong alliances and with strong brands and uh the berkeley is a wonderful brand nam is a long-lasting institution with a wonderful brand and are saying bucharest is also a very strong local brand i would say so the this is an opportunity for consolidation for public vision i would say and public access public support to to access to education and and so let's be optimistic about that but the transition phase and the adaptation of the institution is not always that easy as mentioned by by doral who's part of let's say the management board of his institution and and we know how complex it is to to move and to navigate with academic environment with the back of his functions and so on and to be to be ready for the next next move and to be agile at the same time i would say i'd like to add i think i'm thinking of this from the student perspective where i think in the future there will be lots of students who want to still go to their local university even if it is a lesser brand for that in-person experience that we all acknowledge is still important but now they'll have the ability to supplement that education with specific courses that their institution would never be able to offer um and so that's another way of looking at a hybrid education and it's not a partnership in the sense that the two universities have developed a specific program or partnership but the student can take advantage of different um universities to get their education i think it's much more common today than it was 20 30 years ago for students to take courses at multiple universities as they go through their education and so i think that's another model that it doesn't all have to be spelled out students will do this on their own at extension or at berkeley global we um are open to the public you don't need to be a matriculated student so a lot of students come to us just to supplement with specific course work that we're strong in that's actually super interesting because um maybe for the end of of our discussion we can go a little bit into the q a and and this ties very much into i think sharon you just actually gave an answer to several questions and there were questions coming in about so um how complex do you think it is to take an entire course or curriculum online for example how long will that take um didn't ask how much will that cost but actually to be honest that's probably more the answer is like the more you pay the faster it is done um then there were questions about um the difference in technology areas in the in the world or institutions might not be equipped with all the media and so on and funnily enough what you just explained um makes a lot of sense to me i don't know what you all think about it is well you don't have to like think about it if you are looking at spending two hundred thousand dollars to to create an online course or something um or any number and it'll take you a year why would you do that if you can literally partner with somebody who has the course and you can bring that into your curriculum this is open on our site this is open and it's also depending on what is the size of your institution what is was mentioned by dorel what is the flexibility but we we are learning very fast i would say we were forced to be flexible uh last year we are still due to be very flexible right now and and once again the the crisis the economic constraints we're gonna have in the near future will have an impact on the economy of our own institution so we we've got to adapt and and find the new way to realign as we mentioned with the new needs and the new partnership opportunities so the challenge is very is very the change management this change management topic is very key for us and and it's a big transition we are just about to face and the other point i can mention is that uh moocs uh didn't disrupt us but as mentioned a resume where you can send to a company to get your job won't be exactly the same in the future so the module modularity of what we teach should be uh adapted to different needs depending on when you are in your career path it doesn't mean that you shouldn't have program just like mba which are kind of a refoundation a consolidation an integration of your skills of your experience a new way to to reposition yourself out of let's say an extended approach of let's say an educational journey but at the same time we need to be more flexible in terms of certificate depending on the needs that you may have to go for digital marketing to do to go for these particular techniques in accounting or whatever finance uh so the the end offer will won't have the same structure it and if we don't want to be disrupted by others we need to find the proper modularity of the offer which is on the way on our side because we are breaking all our courses into modules in block the critical block the competence in order to fit the new let's say uh financing approach we we are having and and the structure of our courses are being reshuffled it's actually quite interesting it goes into the direction of a question here that again there have been questions about the finance and and how this will influence what students do but there's a question that came into with this perspective that you are alluding to with us having to rethink also how we structure and finance it we are all public institutions here so we have this perspective of of educating without having a focus on return on investment with stakeholders or investors in the bank but there is an increasing amount of institutions that actually do and they are extremely driven and fast in iterating and developing systems modules and formats of education online that seem to be very much aligned with what the learners are looking for but at the end of the day behind them is investors there's private money so what you spend for your education a big part of it actually does not come back to you as a student so the question here is like what what is your perspective on on the quality of institute the education particularly online given that there will be marketing dollars and a big push from private institutions taking over a lot of the market um but just because the way they are set up they might not necessarily focus only on the quality of the education if i'm allowed as jean-michel said we should capitalize on our brand image first of all we should take into account that all of us are big universities with a certain history behind and we should be flexible with our educational offer on the one hand we have bachelor and master programs which are for everybody which have fight of free access we may say but on the other hand we could have customized executive education and this is let's say the way in which we can be let's say on a liberal market and here in this field of executive education we should come up with new products and new courses which are completely new and designed together with company and company needs so in fact what we need right now in terms of university management we need agility we need flexibility but also we need to ensure some mobility of our offer from one level to another and on our side we need to protect the brand because just like in other industries the brand is key you can trust a brand so if we are having a lot of partnership with different let's say institution who may support our diploma and so on we've got to make sure that we we we check carefully the quality of the partnership and at the end of the day that we protect the content of what we deliver from an educational standpoint and this this is an ongoing this is an important task that we've got to to to revisit our portfolio of partnership and and make sure that content-wise quality wise you can trust the brand and that you secure the content with values with uh let's say proposal linked what i was talking about previously you are not only broadcasting techniques you are also aiming to educate people to be agent in the community in their company with a vision and so on so the brand can be a strong support when a big regular created nam there was a will to make sure that industry could support the development technology could support the development of the french industry and it was just after the french revolution we are facing a new revolution digital revolution was on the way but kovid is bringing another dimension about reshaping the environment and we make sure we need to make sure that the brand the the berkeley brand the assay brand the the what we are selling is still part of the value proposition so we need to protect the brand i would say this is a marketing perspective and i would just like to add um i think from our experience in the end the quality will win there'll be other competitors on the market that don't have the same quality but your students will know the difference they will get jobs they will get into graduate school and that in the end in our experience is what will make a program successful online so i think it takes care of itself and so if educators and companies and universities think of the student in mind that will always be the right answer in the end whether it's academic integrity content flexibility to have current uh content that will to me take care of itself i would just add to what sharon said uh i was speaking about this transformation which should also be not be disruptive for the organizational employees let's say for the universities because we spoke about the students we spoke about partners about consortium of universities but this process of transformation should also take into account the organizational culture each and every one has its own organizational culture for the universities and sometimes when you do this change if it's dramatic change if it is disruptive sometimes people will not follow you in this transformation so this is another challenge we face starting march 2020 in our universities i think we face the same issue because the good news also is that we are not selling uh a basic product we are selling something which is uh which is major how do you transform yourself to be strong enough to find your job to be a an agent in your in your once again in your community in your society and look at sharon we can see that your degree from boston is in your office correct you have your the degree in the your back this is part of your adn this is part of your i do have my my berkeley degree in my office and this is part of my of my let's say construction you know what i mean so that's why we we need to make sure that all our institutions which are long-lasting uh are strong enough are being protected and that the build up the capitalize on on their assets in order to be ready for the next move i actually just realized talking about the financials that um that might be a tough time for the united states and other countries whether you have very high tuition fees um in the future as soon as people figure out they can get a very high level degree from a european or other like can be an asian or latin american institution for a fraction of the tuition fees so i think we need to be on the lookout on our side um let's be creative isn't it what is interesting a new product what is interesting for you all then you are sponsoring the tuition fees um as institutions imagine now you have thousands and hundreds of thousands of students starting to take the full online programs like the bachelor's and master's degrees in europe for example that are financed by the local taxpayers it might be a thing that will push your education systems to rethink themselves in the financing system because there's a lot of people who might just actually be smart enough to to use that the fact that it's subsidized but that's it's a very interesting thing i don't want to trail off with this i think um we're already running close on time so maybe um we can do some some conclusion and and each one of you can take a kind of a take away that you would want to give to our listeners in this in this perspective of what is this new online higher education look like in this controversy with with the assets that we have when in class many uh many advantages and and the traditional system that people are longing for and yet the many opportunities that we have online what would be your respective takeaways um to kind of conclude the panel sharon um i will say i think the the takeaway is just that there are so many options available we're not restricted at all this has really opened up so much for us we can go back to in person and that worked well we can go back to the traditional online that worked well but now there's this whole space in between and then considering the official partnerships we can we can forge the way individual students can create their own experience by open access i think there's just so much to look forward to in my in my opinion i think it's the best moment to be closer to our students and it's a boss moment to change the way we address their needs and also our partners and companies needs and it's a good period to try also to reinvent a little bit ourselves because there is an effort which institution is doing students is doing but also which professors should do in order to update their knowledge so let's revisit what we are doing let's see some other ways we can have in view in delivering our content and everything will be will be okay so this is what i take from this meeting the takeaway on my side is that we can be optimistic because out of such a discussion we can realize that we we create something we build up something we share some element of vision and so this is good because we take notes and we we are writing our new let's say action plan to to do something and to to find new ways to to be there in a few years and the the other dimension is that uh let's see the the pleasure the interest to connect uh is showing us that inspiration is not only local the inspiration can come from different places of the world uh we've been inspired by business ways marketing ways coming from the us but we also are inspired by other dimensions as you mentioned by the the way we do things in europe and so on and if we can balance our ego and say okay let's work together and find solution and fix it then it's it's a wonderful optimistic conclusion on my side and it's a wonderful takeaway it's actually it's great from taking taking all of it together i'm a little bit of a history buff so i see it from this really we have a thousand year tradition as universities to bring faculty professors to our place to educate the local students and with all we have discussed today and all your input it really seems that it's a it's kovit has shifted the paradigm and open doors to change that into another perspective so also two questions from the audience and thank you very much for engaging with us with the panel through your questions um my takeaway from all i've heard today is don't stay like within your little local environment and try to do it on your own one of the great opportunities of online is not just online education it's online collaboration it's online teaching as a student you can choose courses as sharon described from any type of institution as an institution you can work with partners and collaborate if you don't have it somebody else might have it if you don't know how to do something maybe another colleague has an idea how to do it so i think it's it's really interesting through having to stay at home we have really become more international or open more doors actually for collaboration so i think it's a wonderful takeaway indeed at at the end of this panel discussion and john michelle do you want to close us out yeah this is my i guess it's a senior position that you give me it's time to make the conclusion and to to not do

2021-02-18 02:46

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