Writing in The Guardian, John Naughton observes that the COVID19 pandemic may well accelerate the demise of the university as we know it, complete with its dominant mode of teaching and learning, the lecture. This may all come as a surprise to college and university leaders who have ignored all the signs of a major transition in the way knowledge is created and distributed that have been in evidence for at least the last quarter century. Far from rethinking the purposes of the university and re-positioning institutions for the future, the major move of leaders in the higher education sector has been to double-down on the old model, expanding campus facilities, attaching expensive bells and whistles throughout, adding classroom technologies that pave the way for internet learning, shifting to part-time teaching staff discernible from their online counterparts only by the lower production values mandated by central support units, and adding marketing teams to reinforce parochial institutional identities in the face of the wholesale migration of learning opportunities to networked sources.
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