CHLOE 5: The Pivot to Remote Teaching in Spring 2020 and Its Impact

THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF ONLINE EDUCATION, 2020

CHLOE 5 Finds Most Institutions Satisfied with Outcome of Quick Online Pivot, but Planning Improvements for Fall

The annual CHLOE (Changing Landscape of Online Education) survey chronicles the evolution of online policies and practices in U.S. higher education, from the perspective of Chief Online Officers (COOs). The fifth CHLOE survey captures leadership reflections on the pandemic-induced emergency remote instruction in the spring: what happened, what worked, and implications for fall. The CHLOE 5 report is published amid a coronavirus spike that is persuading many colleges and universities to re-think their fall re-opening plans.

The results—available in the report CHLOE 5: The Pivot to Remote Teaching in Spring 2020 and Its Impact—reflect how most COOs judged the pivot to have been completely or largely successful in achieving its primary goal of allowing students to complete the academic term. However, their top targets for improvement of remote teaching for fall 2020 are faculty training and professional development, standardization on common technology tools, increased faculty-student interaction, enhanced student orientation, and introduction of quality standards

Focused treatment of several related issues made the following points, which are elaborated in this report:

• Technology improvements during the pivot to remote teaching were most widely focused on use of the Learning Management System (LMS), followed at a considerable distance by increased use of video tools.
• Online program managers (OPMs) were not used to meeting the demands of the pivot, but many OPM users plan to expand their OPM engagements to cover remote learning needs for the future. Non-users of OPMs express little interest in exploring this option, based on the pivot experience.
• Institutions heavily invested in online learning had an easier time responding to the pandemic shutdown and pivot to remote teaching.
• Comparison of the pivot experience of institutions with extensive pre-pandemic online programs to those without this experience and infrastructure draws out the implications of more widespread faculty and student familiarity with online learning and larger instructional design (ID) staffs for a successful pivot.
• Also included is a personal reflection on the pandemic’s impact on one institution, and higher education in general by Eric Fredricksen, Associate Vice President for Online Learning at the University of Rochester.

This report was made possible through the partnership of Quality Matters and Eduventures Research—the research division of ACT® | NRCCUA®—and the support of sponsors iDesign and Archer Education.

The CHLOE 6 Survey, which will focus on issues such as governance of online programs, blended learning and the influence of subject matter on the design, and delivery of online programs, will be administered soon. If you are a Chief Online Officer and wish to participate in the next CHLOE Survey, or if you wish to nominate the COO at your institution, please contact Eduventures Research Senior Quantitative Analyst Mughees Khan.