Nicholas Dirks is a professor of history and of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as the 10th chancellor until mid-2017. An internationally renowned historian and anthropologist specializing in the study of South Asia, he is a leader in higher education and well-known for his thought leadership in areas ranging from the future of the university to the strategic reconceptualization of educational reform on a global scale.

Before coming to Berkeley, Dirks was the executive vice president for the arts and sciences and dean of the faculty at Columbia University. More recently, in February 2018, Dirks was named chancellor and vice-chairman of Whittle School & Studios, a global network of independent schools to be established in China, the United States, India, and Europe.

Starting from May 2020, Dirks will be teaching online a course called "Leading in Higher Education", which he was scheduled to teach in-person in Beijing at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University. The following interview hopes to draw out personal insights as he prepares for his first online teaching experience.

• Policies to maintain continuity for international students
• Excited to teach better by being a student again
• Important things university leadership need to consider, now and beyond
• As a historian, what lessons can or should educators learn from the past?

Policies to maintain continuity for international students

This is obviously a very, very big issue. It was an unexpected transition to online education for everyone. A number of institutions have tried to make provision, including Berkeley, for international students by saying that if they need to stay on campus, they can stay in the dorms. And so there actually is a sizeable number of international students still on campus at Berkeley. They had been distributed across dorms so that they are able to keep social distancing. They've been allowed to continue to get food from university dining. And so, of course, they don't have problems with the synchronous online instruction that involves any change of time zones since they're in the time zone where, of course, the faculty are teaching. And that's true, of course, not only to college students, but also teaching assistants and many of our graduate students who also participate in teaching.
 
But of course, some students have had left for their homes, whether it's China or India or parts of Europe and the U.K. And then, of course, anything that is synchronous is a problem. And so what some of the universities have tried to do, e.g. what Berkeley has done and I know a little bit about what Columbia has done where I used to teach there and where my son is now a student, is to have some of the lectures that are being offered recorded so that students can see them asynchronously. Even though seminars and some kinds of assignments and study groups and the like have to be done synchronously.
 
Sometimes you have a lecture and then the students will break for a discussion section. And there's been an effort at Berkeley, among other things, to break up this discussion section so that if there are students in a time zone, they are all put in the same discussion section. And when possible, given a teaching assistant who can adjust their schedule in a way that is possible. And, you know, for example, I'm talking to you, now it's five o'clock in the evening in California; and it's eight o'clock in the morning of the next day in Beijing. It's working hours on both sides of the of the Zoom connection that we're currently on. New York, of course, has a few more issues because it's eight o'clock in the evening now. But even then, it is possible to do. And if you have discussion groups that are in China or in India or in Europe, you can group them in a way that actually works across everybody's waking hours.
 
But the lectures themselves are being recorded. Now, of course, at Berkeley, in some fields, many of the lectures were already being recorded. And so that is not something that had to be started from scratch. Tends to be the case that that was done more in fields like engineering and science, less so in fields like humanities and social science, where sometimes faculty are not used to using online technology for teaching. And, for them, that has been an adjustment. But because this has been an extraordinary moment and a very challenging situation. Effectively all instruction continues, but faculty are not taking attendance so that they're not actually discounting a student's grade on the basis of attendance, knowing that that will be possibly very difficult. And they are also encouraging, in fact, making the default a pass-fail grades so that students won't be seen any kind of damage to their grade point average in the course of the semester.
 
Now this is again a short-term kind of fix. If this situation continues on a longer term, I think there'll be more attention over the summer to figuring out how to pre-record as much of the course material as possible so that it can be used to asynchronously. There may be choices that students make on the basis of whether a course is being taught synchronously or asynchronously so that they at least know ahead of time what they what they're signing up for. And of course, faculty will be learning much more and gaining from the experience they've had teaching online. But everybody is scrambling to offer the best possible instruction under circumstances that they know are difficult.
 
And the other thing I'll say is that there's been a great recognition that it's not only an educational challenge, but often it's a great personal challenge. People are when they go home, they have different kinds of accommodations and different kinds of family situations. So there may be a lot of children at home, younger children who are taking courses or not in school and therefore need some attention on childcare. There may be aged parents. There obviously is concern and fear on the part of many about whether they've been infected and if they are, what health consequences will be for them. So I think there's been a great effort to accommodate students to the extent possible.

Excited to teach better by being a student again

The most exciting part right now is that I can continue to teach since I've been ordered to shelter in place in California, so I really don't have an option, either I go online or I don't teach. And the most exciting thing is I'll still be able to teach. And the technology is sufficient to allow at least, you know, reasonable simulation of the teaching experience. It's not the same, obviously. I'm disappointed that I'm not going to be able to be on campus, at the Schwarzman College residence under Tsinghua’s campus.
  
I guess that the positive part is that for me and as you know, I've been thinking about education both in the K-12 space and the college and university space. I'm going to learn a lot more about how online instruction really feels, since I've never done this in a pedagogical sense. I've done this in meetings, but I haven't done it in teaching. Even in the role that I'm taking on next year, I will be involved in thinking about online education virtually at every level.

I'm actually fine because I'll be start teaching the Schwarzman classes, with most of the students from China and also a few from other parts of Asia, Europe and the US. And usually if I can see everybody's faces on the upper part of my screen and I can tell who's there, recognize if they raise their hand, and stimulate discussion, which, of course, my class at Schwarzman will be a mix of lecture and discussion. And I hope I can simulate the experience of being in the classroom. Now, I understand that there are features that will enhance the learning experience, both for the learning experience for students and the teaching experience for me by helping me identify and facilitate interactions. But of course, you know, in my class, I'm asking for short response papers to the readings each class, and I will get them online and read them ahead of time. I will know sort of what students are thinking and what their responses are, in general terms, before I start engaging them on the online platform. So I think it will go fine.

Important things university leadership need to consider, now and beyond

There are a number of real challenges that we have to keep in mind. I think for large lectures you clearly don't have the capacity to interact with students in the way that you do, even in a large lecture hall in person. I think something is lost from not having the physical co-location of students and professor. And I think that, you know, we need to make sure that we're not simply replicating what is done in person online, but rather thinking about technology as a tool that needs to be adapted to provide other kinds of opportunities to enhance the interaction between and among students and between students and faculty.
 
I’ve been shown different educational platforms that I've been asked to evaluate. Some of them have the capacity for breakout groups that can be implemented almost immediately. So you just click on a few names and then you have two, three, four or five breakout groups that can work together for 10 minutes, or whatever it might be, come up with some common themes and questions and issues they want to raise. And that way you can actually in some ways move people back and forth between small group and large group more quickly and efficiently than you would if you were actually in person. But again, I think there may be many other kinds of techniques and I'm going to be able to learn some of them during this online teaching experience that I am going to have.
 
But my hope going forward is that faculty will not feel intimidated the way they felt intimidated in the past by teaching online. There are a lot of faculty are doing it for the first time. In the US, a lot of faculty are complaining a lot. I hope that the complaints become predicated now on real experience rather than just prejudice. And I hope that some of those can be accommodated by the fact that technology is changing, and a lot of EdTech innovation is being done in order to try to develop better means whereby one can actually engage, stimulate, excite students and of course, promote learning.

As a historian, what lessons can or should educators learn from the past?

I think everybody thought 2011, and Stanford President John Hennessy said that, was going to be a tsunami in education. The fall of that year was when the "artificial intelligence" course at Stanford was first taught by Sebastian Thrun online as a MOOC.



In this course, more than 160,000 people around the world signed up to learn jointly, the first time in history that a course met so many students. Everybody thought that was going to change everything, and of course, it didn't — partly because the MOOC is passive rather than active in relation to learning. And it didn't change things because people who had the option took the option to take that course in person, either with Sebastian or someone else at some other great institution.

But this kind of crisis also has unintended consequences, in particular, extraordinarily difficult effects on the budgets of many colleges and universities. And they're going to have to find ways to use online learning to keep solvent financially going forward.

At the end, I think all of us will recognize that education is such a powerful need and such a powerful part of everyone's life that it can go on even during a pandemic. And for all deficiencies of technology and for all of the worries we have about it, is now finally a tool, even beyond what it might have seemed in 2011 that can be adapted and used increasingly, even when people can’t get back into residential college situations and not worry about the spread of the virus.