The Transforming Impact of COVID-19

What’s the long-term impact to our industry of COVID-19? While it has been a painful and exhausting road so far, we must begin to see some of the potential benefits of what we have experienced. We must find the opportunity in the crisis.

Our sense is that the long-term impact of the coronavirus pandemic on education will be four-fold. When our environment returns back to some level of normalcy, albeit a new normal, the pandemic will have:

1. Legitimized online delivery at the primary/secondary level, which was much-needed in order to schools to start thinking about expanding their learning modalities;

2. Created new price and access points, which could serve to educate more people in more effective ways over time;

3. Transformed how we use time, potentially moving us away from an old, tired schedule model of 8 AM to 3 PM to a dynamic, continuous learning environment;

4. Improved credentialing and assessment. moving away from the old Carnegie unit assessing merely seat time in class and rote learning to a competency, skill, and attribute model of assessment.

I am sure that there are more benefits, but for starters, it is an impressive list. While each of these four items were in motion prior to the outbreak, the pandemic will serve as an accelerator to transform learning and restructure our system.