Do you think more universities will start to offer online degrees now?

[AbsentmindedWoman]

Am wondering about this, especially postgrad courses. It would open up a lot more choices to mature students if there was a general shift to flexible learning with online and blended learning options.

Do you think this might happen?

Anyone?

There's been a suggestion that all degrees will be online for the academic year 2020-21. I hope this is wrong.

It may be something Unis are forced to do during the pandemic but it will lead to a massive drop in standards. Well thought out online courses are difficult and time consuming to develop, as well as needing people who have a background in online learning. For many disciplines there is no substitute for face to face learning. Students will have to be very motivated to keep up with the work from home and cash strapped Unis facing financial ruin will just record and upload lectures on an endless repeat loop as a cost cutting measure. It will be the death blow for many universities.

Many universities had already started to switch to online provision nearly five or six years ago. Even for campus based UG courses and modules all lectures had to uploaded to the Canvas or equivalent platform.I know because I spent six months training and doing this just for our one module.

Plenty of online degrees and postgrads already.
Part of the purpose of university is allowing young people to learn to manage life, to grow up in a reasonably safe environment and make a few mistakes, to get excess out of their systems before the tedium of adulthood falls upon them.
I’d think online only would be a really retrogressive step and would impact most on the poorer students.

Lots of online courses available already and all the Pre-sessional for international students will be online this year. I personally don't like them, prefer the face to face contact and need the classroom environment. As a teacher I also prefer face to face teaching as the classroom dynamics are so important and can't translate to online lessons.

It has already been happening.

Is that pretty similar to Open University?

I'm nearly finished an OU degree and have done it all online. Never attended a face to face tutorial in 6 years

Yes it's being accelerated at my university.

I work for a university and we are looking at doing more online. But remember, moving teaching online as an emergency response to COVID-19 which we have done over last few weeks, is very far away from properly teaching a degree online. That needs huge investment and resources. And every uni will be hit hard over the crisis so will struggle to respond. In the short term I imagine there will be a mixture of face to face and online delivery come Sept/Oct.