Watch Fascinating Video Interview With Roosevelt Island Cornell Tech Dean Greg Morrisett Looking Back Last 2 Years On Impact Of Covid Pandemic And Role Of Technology For Universities - Future Of Higher Education Too

Dean Greg Morrisett takes a look back on the impact of the pandemic during the last two years and the role technology played in this interview with FOBtv Host Kevin Benedict: https://t.co/oPCJZmbJ84#Video #COVID19 #OnlyAtCornellTech #EngineeredToMatter @frankdiana pic.twitter.com/qwSvfqaGeY

— Cornell Tech (@cornell_tech) December 20, 2022

Here's an excerpt from a fascinating year end 2022 interview of Roosevelt Island Cornell Tech Dean Greg Morrisett by Future Of Business TV host Kevin Benedict. According to Dean Morrisett:

Two years ago I think we were all just terrified of where things were going, how long it would take to recover and get back to quote-unquote normal. We at Cornell and Cornell Tech had students on campus so what we were focused on was keeping them safe. Testing was happening every single day for many of the students and these were PCR tests, not rapid tests, trying to identify cases and then doing contact tracing around those cases and quarantining the students and people that may have been exposed. We were just absolutely terrified.

We were not in the classrooms then, we were teaching completely remotely and that was a big change and adjustment and eye-opening for all of us. We're since back in the classroom mostly but I think we learned a lot from that purely online experience and took some lessons away from that. 

It was a slow adjustment back to a situation where we were no longer testing, no longer quarantining. The vaccines had a tremendous impact and it was controversial but we required all of the students and all of the staff and the faculty to be vaccinated. I think that was a  good call for most universities that were able to do that. That allowed them to get back in and operate safely so the vaccines were probably the biggest inflection point in the Covid journey for all of us in the universities....

  ... It's a new normal. For example, we still had masking requirements for a long time and even today in New York for example on public transit they were required masks for a long time. They've now moved to recommended masking as opposed to required so there was a gentle sort of ramp from full masking all the time and lots of spacing in the classroom and so forth all those concerns, to recognizing that actually young people, students who were fully vaccinated, were rarely hit with a bad case of Covid. 

In fact, as far as I know we had no cases where there was a hospitalization amongst the student population post-vaccination and it was primarily affecting un-vaccinated people and folks that were older as opposed to young students....

... I think even before the pandemic there was a push especially in higher-ed around flipped classrooms and trying to basically make material much more engaging and move away from the the old model of the Sage On The Stage, the the lecturer in front of hundreds of students pontificating about the world.

In an age of students with their cell phones and their laptops and so forth they just did not find that approach very engaging. So when we pivoted online, what was fascinating to me was there were a lot of courses that actually got better somewhat surprisingly and in fact many technical courses for instance became much better run and and part of that was more engagement with the students in problem solving and working in teams directly online. You could do breakouts and teachers could move between them fluidly without having to have a giant space to physically house the students in.

Students were happier  in those settings where the material was something they could play back. They saw a lecture but they didn't understand it they could go back and watch it again at two times speed.

All that provided a new set of resources for students to engage more deeply with the material. It didn't work for some classes. For example, some of our business classes or law classes where the Socratic method is a preferred approach, the online system just  did not work. 

The tools that we have are not there yet and I think people experimented with many different approaches to teaching. Some of them were really far out there like trying to use augmented or virtual reality or other kinds of virtual presence beyond basics like Zoom or meetings online. Those things are still fun to explore, I think someday they'll get there but they're not there yet. 

One thing that I think we learned very well is hybrid still doesn't work. A mix of in-person and online is maybe the worst of all worlds. If you're going to do a course either do it all online or do it all in person and that was a takeaway that that we've really leaned into here after  coming back from Covid...

 Watch the full interview.

Interview topics included:

Q1 Walk us through how things at Cornell evolved from 2020 until today. 2:21 

Q2 So from that point you could just charge ahead relatively normal? 4:21 

Q3 What innovations that came out of that period sort of stuck? 5:21 

Q4 If you can bring it all together in a story form, that’s an immersive format, with a thread that takes a student through...That’s still critical. What are your thoughts there? 11:04 

Q5 In 2020 you said that student’s really value meeting in person. Did Covid change that or just delay it? 13:08 

Q6 In 2020 you said that you were going to have to rethink why you are bringing students to the campus. What have you learned since then? How does that work today? 16:49 

Q7 In 2020 you said that the days of big auditoriums are probably passed us. Do you hold to that opinion? 18:47 

Q8 In 2020 you said that you thought that we’re going to see a lot of differences from the classic university architecture to how we will conceptualize it and think about the campus of the future. What are your thoughts today? 20:15 

 Q9 In 2020 I asked you the question “Where is the competition of the future going to come from in higher education?” What are your thoughts on that today? 24:06 

Q10 In regards to personalization, are you seeing that kind of technology actually being used? 31:15 

Q11 It seems females outnumber males in universities by significant amounts, how is that going to impact the future of universities? 33:53 

Q12 In another demographic, people are having fewer children in western countries and soon globally. In what way will that impact the future of universities? 35:56