“My suspicion is that the negative experiences of the past several months may have damaged the reputation of online education itself, but that many of the features and programs we’ve developed due to this emergency transition are going to have a positive impact going forward,” said Joyner, executive director of online education and the popular OMSCS program, online master of science in computer science, in Tech’s College of Computing. “There were lots of things that didn’t go well, and it’s definitely turned many people off to the idea of online education.” However, Joyner added, “We saw during the pandemic that college professors’ opinion of online learning improved, and there are several features we developed over the past year that students want to continue, such as recorded classes. Going forward, I think we have to disentangle several developments that went together during COVID-19, but don’t have to go together going forward.”
