Coronavirus and academia: what can we do to help now?

I’ve been tracking the coronavirus outbreak and its impact on higher education for weeks. That’s a mix of blog posts and tweets.

My question today is: what else can I do to help?

Is there anything I can add based on my futures, education, and technology expertise?

I’ve been having offline conversations with many people over the past months. Here are some of the ideas folks have offered. Each has its own benefits, affordances, and costs:

1. Holding video conversations about COVID-19 and education, modeled on the Future Trends Forum. Host one or several experts (CDC, WHO, campus planners, HHS, researchers) and connect them with an audience in actual conversation. Grab sponsors.
2. Work with a nonprofit, government agency, professional organization, or business to host a video conversation aimed at their particular slice of academia.
3. Start a podcast series updating us on the latest about COVID-19 and education. It might have to be fairly frequent, given the speed of events.
4. Run an email newsletter updating readers on the latest about COVID-19 and education. Each issue would be smaller than FTTE, which is monthly.
5. Launch a public research project on how campuses can best use the digital world to protect their communities while conducting their educational missions. This could include blog posts here, articles, video, audio, interviews, discussions, etc.
6. Keep doing what I’ve been doing with blogging and Twitter.

I’m putting this to you all, dear readers, because I need your guidance. I want to help higher education through this crisis, and also want to do so well.

What do you think? If you prefer to reach out to me privately, click here.

Originally published at https://bryanalexander.org on March 5, 2020.