It’s the first week of the month, and so it’s time for what’s become a 2020 tradition. Today I’d like to share a special edition of my Future Trends in Technology and Education (FTTE) report. It’s a COVID-19 and higher education report.
With this special open edition I’m continuing what I started in April and continued in May. If people think it’s useful, I’ll keep doing so every month until the pandemic ends in some way. Let me know what you think.
Some background: for nearly ten years FTTE has appeared each month, covering nearly 100 trends impacting colleges and universities.
It isn’t normally free. Each report takes a lot of work to produce, so FTTE has been subscription based since 2018. But the coronavirus crisis is extraordinary, and I hope FTTE research can be useful to some people in and around academia. Not everyone can justify or afford the subscription, I know well, especially as the economy sags into recession and worse, so you can now access this one for free.
It isn’t the full June 2020 report. It’s just the content that bears on COVID-19, which turns out to be about 80% of the whole thing. So it’s nearly the entire report.
This special report is not only free, but also open. I’m publishing it under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license, so you can do whatever you like with it. Copy and paste it, take out and use the chunks you like, insert pages into a PowerPoint presentation, set it to music, embed bits in a role-playing game, whatever your heart desires… so long as you reference the report’s name and me as its creator.
There isn’t any DRM. There aren’t any restrictions or requirements of any kind.
Now, if you value the report and have there wherewithal to support FTTE research, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could contribute to its sustainability in this crisis. If you can, head to the FTTE site and subscribe. If you prefer, join the supportive crowd on Patreon. Whichever way you like, as an independent futurist in an economic crisis, I’d be very grateful.
Click here to download the pdf.
Bryan, you write that “more campuses announced plans to return to in-person education this fall, including… the SUNY system” with a footnoted link to Chancellor Johnson’s note on the SUNY website. I don’t take the same conclusion from that letter, and I think it makes only vague and uncertain statements about in-person instruction:
“how we are planning to resume face-to-face, on campus instruction”
“seven working groups focused on specific areas integral to a safe and successful resumption of residential education”
“determine the safest and most effective route forward”
“We understand that resuming face-to-face instruction cannot occur in a vacuum”
“develop plans and a checklist of criteria that must be met before on-campus learning resumes”
And this entire paragraph:
“In addition to a checklist, and part of our resume strategy, SUNY is creating a risk wheel that will dynamically pull real-time data from a number of dashboards to help all of us manage operations during the transition back to face-to-face instruction and beyond.”
None of that sounds at all certain to me, with no specifics about Fall 2020, or indeed any date for resumption of face-to-face instruction. I presume you read it differently, or do you have other indications from SUNY that they have already decided to go back to in-person classes in the Fall?