In a year that’s been largely defined by the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent transition to remote learning, it’s little surprise that the first day the 2020 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference focused so heavily on digital transformation and its role in how higher education has responded and adapted. In dozens of sessions throughout the day, IT leaders from universities around the nation shared their experiences and efforts over recent months as their schools raced to maintain some level of continuity for their students, faculty and staff.
At Washington State University, CIO Sasi Pillay and his team found themselves tasked with overcoming multiple significant gaps within the digital divide, with many students lacking the devices and internet access they needed in order to participate in online classes and many faculty unfamiliar with the technologies being used to provide virtual instruction.
“I always talk about the three A’s: access, availability and affordability,” Pillay says. “I think we found quickly that all of these applied to our students. We quickly put together a loaner laptop program and a loaner hotspot program, but we soon found out that this alone was not sufficient. Then we looked at engaging our designers and network folks to deploy Wi-Fi in our parking lots.”
The program, Pillay said, ultimately evolved into a statewide endeavor that grew from 60 locations to nearly 600. The school has also distributed hundreds of Chromebooks and around 1,000 hotspots.
At Auburn University, instructional design specialists quickly recognized a similar problem among their own students, said Shawndra Bowers, associate director for learning experience design. “We discovered there were lots of students who didn’t have access to adequate technology outside of the resources they had on campus,” she explained. In response, the university purchased laptops, hotspots and webcams that were subsequently shipped to students’ homes.