Prof. Hamish Coates recently shared during a Times Higher Education Podcast about the next phase of online delivery and his thoughts on the future of higher education. Here are some of the highlights:

We must differentiate this with “online learning”

Real secret to success during crises

(Introduction to XuetangX International Version)

It's the perfect time to rethink assessments in higher education!

Leading with resilience, excelling through crises

We need university leaders to be in charge!

       We Must Differentiate this with “Online Learning”.

      And for now, I suppose, coming on six or seven weeks, we've been delivering what I would refer to as emergency online learning. We have to be pretty careful not to just say we are doing online learning, because I dearly hope we do reopen the campus at some point and we go back to having campus-based education. And secondly, the sort of online learning that we're doing now is not the same as the premium, really sophisticated forms of online learning that many universities have been working on for some decades.

       The way that the online education business has flourished in recent years is that it has become incredibly sophisticated. There's a whole ecosystem of EdTech firms is essentially billions of dollars of business and venture capital. And they have started to come up with some really super sophisticated way for doing education, you know, reconfiguring curriculum; allowing people to learn across different sorts of platforms; working through language barriers; having real current feedback based on how learners are interacting with the technology; having “teachers” interacting with learners to ensure that people are doing really well; teams and psychologists to support students and make sure that they're not at risk of dropping out; and all sorts of additional experiences.

       We see this through the commercial platforms, but we also see it through a number of nonprofit platforms as well. And of course several of those are associated with universities and in China many are associated with Tsinghua. While we haven't done a lot of formal online learning within the university programs itself, at the end of the street, we do have one of the biggest MOOC in the world — xuetangX. And it’s an enormous number of faculty who develop online learning platforms and teacher online. And we have a large number of SPOC that we also used to teach internally in an online teaching platform — the Rain Classroom.

       SPOC (Small Private Open Course) is essentially where faculty will use their own course or their own MOOC or another MOOC. And they will use that within the classroom, on the campus. We have a situation where sophisticated online learning involves teams of people who are education engineers reading curriculum, making sure that the teachings gone seamlessly. It's highly responsive and individually made. It has really great assessment. And with emergency online learning, I think we also have a situation where people are basically doing what it takes to do the teaching and provide students with an ongoing education experience using the whole range of platforms.

       The really interesting question is how the two will come together in the future?

       Real Secret to Success During Crises.

       In around 2011-2012, Tsinghua formed a partnership with edX, and provided a gateway and a platform for offering global MOOCs inside China, but also outside of China. So xuetangX is the one of the biggest MOOC provider in the world by volume, and it provides materials to universities across the world and students in the public. Associate with that is the new platform developed in the last three years called the Rain Classroom (see how this university in China maximizing Rain Classroom to engage students), which basically integrates WeChat (social messaging app) and PowerPoint. So you can show a lecture video on your PowerPoints. There are other platforms, but Rain Classroom is developed within Tsinghua. So we have a situation where we could readily tend to our own platform to bring this sort of emergency online learning solutions to our students.

       I think one of the real secrets to success in being able to turn a very top campus-based institution to a top online provider in two weeks, is to basically say to the faculty, which is exactly what our leader said to us, go ahead and do what you can and use what it takes to get the job done for our students. And it was a clear message of direction and clear support from the leadership and the support networks the university to help faculty convert the often very traditional approaches to teaching into very high tech approaches. I think it was that trust and confidence in the faculty to basically use whatever it took to get the job done that helped made it happen.

      After 6 years of incredible development, XuetangX has grown to be one of the largest MOOC and online learning platforms in the world, and it decided to extend its services to global users and will be launching its international edition in late-April.

     Check out the reasons why 58 million learners and 30 top institutions, such as edX, Stanford, Open University (UK), etc. ， decided to rely on XuetangX for online learning with this 20-page intro presentation? Download intro slides for XuetangX International Version. It's the perfect time to rethink assessments in higher education!

       So most assessment in higher education is still happening the same way happened 100 years ago. It has been incredibly slow and difficult to reform. And I'm talking about most of the world's 20000 universities here, not just China and not just Tsinghua. For example, I am currently looking at the building of the University of Melbourne where I took a lot of my undergraduate and graduate assessments. And I know if it would be open for examinations in two months’ time, students would be going in there and sitting at small desks and regurgitating stuff they crimped into their head over the preceding week. That's not the best way to test knowledge. That's not the best way to safely say someone is a competent, professional or expert.

       So, again, what we've seen is that this has forced people to rethink how they can understand what the students are learning. Simply assigning grades, particularly when you're teaching cohorts of students who are amongst the most talented in the world is a rather strange thing. There are some elite universities in the US that have as their educational motto, “do no harm”. The idea being you can get super-smart people and just expose them to a wealth of opportunities. And regardless of whether you give them an exam or not, they are still largely going to go on to contribute and changing the world. So I'm not sure that unless it's a gateway piece of assessment, it's really so high stakes for the student or so high stakes for the institution.

       What we do know is that assessment is providing good feedback to people that help inform their learning — this is what makes assessment real.

       Leading with resilience, excelling through crises.

      You know, we've seen an institution which was already enormously resilient, even pre-crisis. And I suppose it's partly because of the faculty and the leadership who have instilled a culture, pride, and commitment for learning to our students. On top of that, since the crisis, an enormous amount of data and personnel are involved in making sure that the students mentally are coping with the studies; and this is happening through faculty level support as well.

       The initial interest for Tsinghua is just delivering on the promise of the semester and getting the students through this course of teaching. In about two months, Tsinghua will be wrapping up its academic year. Then, it’s the "what's next?" And I think a really prudent move was made by leadership early on to say we have a huge natural experiment before our eyes. And unless we studied this, we can't make the best improvements through our own university or contribute to future thinking about where higher education is going.

       Now, if anyone can find the magic formula that somehow blends campus and mobile phones and computers and airplanes to somehow come up with the perfect higher education cocktail, they will be able to solve a riddle that people have been studying for about the last 40 years. I suspect there is no one solution, but what we will look to do is to find ways to augment the campus. I'm aware that things like augmented reality and virtual reality are becoming more common and accessible. We can augment the campus in all sorts of interesting ways that we wouldn't have thought about five years ago. And we will probably also take out certain parts of the campus and put online experiences in there. So we will see campus space, at least residential education, with an overlay of very rich online learning experiences. And hopefully, that will enable students to save time flying around the world and at the same time bring every guest lecturer you could ever imagine into the one classroom.

       I suppose this shock gave us the opportunity to really make moves in some of these directions. I think it's really important though what we're working through now is not about online learning per se. Instead, it is looking at how major universities are leading through crises, making institutions resilient and change in the face of contemporary circumstances.

      We need university leaders to be in charge!

     There are plenty of research opportunities that Tsinghua's Institute of Education is currently involved in: from the use of technology to interviewing university leaders for their experience and understanding policy implications. So, where are we going with this? Where is this heading? I would argue that this is a new and exciting time because for the first time technology is in the background and educators are at the forefront instead — it is not about the absolute technology and it is about the future of higher education. Although we all understand it is a very fragile situation, there are also many amazing and positive things going on, like educational leadership and institutional changes.

      Many institutions, including very elite ones, have been teaching online, though some have done a pretty bad job; thus, giving a subpar reputation for the quality of online learning. In many countries, there are not many related policies or regulations saying you cannot do online, but at the same time, there are no clear structures and guidelines about online education either — as we really don't know what’s going on, especially regarding the quality.

      We are likely to move towards a blended future with more premium online and on-campus experience, but we need more data — to better manage learners’ behaviors, take care of the social aspect, as well as making the experience more fun! In order words, we need the university leaders to be in charge (and not just the tech guy).

      And in some ways, universities have been very good at that, and in other ways, they're very resistant and very conservative. I would think in about two months we'll have an amazing and unprecedented series of insights that Tsinghua can share with the world as to what the future of higher education should look like, as well as what good quality learning looks like. And that's the sort of stuff that we need to start telling the parents and the students of tomorrow so that they can prepare themselves and learning new and different ways.