Phil Hill
Publisher of the PhilOnEdTech Blog and Partner at MindWires, LLC
If you just keep getting people to adopt technology without dealing with the accessibility concerns, you're setting yourself up for a huge problem. And it's the right thing to do. You need to help students. Universal Design for Learning and everything that goes with it on the student support. This wraps back into the income inequality..It's not necessarily classroom support. You need to have additional support structures to ensure that all student groups, however you break them down, have opportunities to succeed. That means your advisors need to have information to know how to help students. If you have mentoring programs, you need to have support for training and for doing this. So basically student support, particularly with appropriate advising, has to be part of your budget priorities.
Key Interview Takeaways
One of the long-term impacts of COVID-19 will be the hybridization of education. The traditional but artificial view of instruction as fully in-person or fully online misses the rich and growing overlap of hybrid methods. With Covid accelerating this trend, we are seeing higher education transition to a combination of the two formats. Instructional designers will be a key resource as faculty adapt to this new learning environment.
The move to online learning can be viewed in different ways. Some may think that offering instruction online will dismantle what higher education typically looks like and make it more available to underrepresented groups. Others may think that online learning actually creates more gaps in equity and accessibility.
Some of the big trends in higher education are income inequality and challenges to social mobility, and these trends are in effect being exacerbated by COVID-19 and this year's protest-driven social upheaval. One way that we can help students at our institutions is to increase budgets for student advising and mentoring so that students have someone to encourage them and help them navigate the system, an effort that requires difficult financial decisions.
Biography
Phil Hill (@PhilOnEdTech) is Publisher of the PhilOnEdTech blog and Partner at MindWires, LLC. As a market analyst, Phil has analyzed the growth of technology-enabled change for educational institutions, uncovering and describing the major trends and implications for the broader market. His unique graphics and visual presentations have been widely used in the industry. As an independent consultant, Phil helps educational institutions, technology and content vendors, and policy makers as they consider and implement new initiatives. Phil’s clients have included Western Governors University, California Community College System, Iowa State University, Bournemouth University, Pearson Education, Coursera, multiple investment firms, and others.
Previously Phil was an independent consultant through HBO Systems and Delta Initiative. In addition to e-Literate, Phil has also written for EDUCAUSE Review, Inside Higher Ed, and the Washington Post. He has also been interviewed and quoted at National Public Radio, Inside Higher Ed, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, Buzzfeed Education, and Washington Business Journal.