Education has been turned upside-down by this crisis. Beyond the personal and national losses in human and economic terms, work is already changed beyond recognition. At Condé Nast College of Fashion and Design, we are experiencing the same digital whirlwind as everyone else in the education sector. I have the privilege of leading an unbelievably dedicated team, and everyone from academics and marketeers to admissions and the learning technology people making it possible for us to keep teaching are pulling together as they’ve never needed to before. 

We’re trying to make the online student experience as good as it can be, but adapting and shaping this whole new style of teaching in real time is damn hard. Lectures designed for campus-based delivery don’t always work the same way across the ether and we are all having to make previously undreamed of changes to the way we try to inspire and involve our students. But this my team has done brilliantly.

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A long-lasting impact

The impact on the world of education – including further and higher education institutions – will be long-lasting. Like many other institutions, we’ve been looking at expanding our online offering for some time and that process has been accelerated exponentially. We’re developing resources, including films with wonderful content in terms of visual design aesthetics, but also providing material on staying safe and protecting mental and physical health and wellbeing. Accelerating that pace of change in developing a more robust online presence has become an urgent necessity. 

We’ve learnt how important it is to keep a constant conversation going with students and letting them know that we are here to support them, not just in normal working hours but practically 24/7. Some students are really feeling isolated, as we all are, and missing the comradeship and community we’ve built at the college. 

Fortunately, as a specialist college, that sense of togetherness is very strong and students are coming together through their devices for myriad social events such as virtual house parties and quizzes. There is an overwhelming feeling that everyone is doing their best in their own ways to keep community spirit alive.

To do the same must be very tough for larger institutions such as public universities with enormous and inevitably less personally connected student bodies. We’re learning from the students about platforms such as TikTok for example – previously a foreign land to most of us over 40 – because there’s no point being anywhere other than in the arenas that learners already habitually inhabit. 

An 'and' not an 'or'

It’s interesting to note that the universities are now suggesting they will expect to charge the same fees for courses taught online in future as they would have done face to face. They need to tread very carefully. Value is a highly subjective concept and each university's “sell” to its students needs to be carefully thought through. 

If the bricks-and-mortar student experience, complete with the accommodation offer, student social offer and everything else is not there, and that is how the fees have been partly justified, it leads to potential conflict when much of that is taken away. The focus must be on the quality of the learning experience and that can be very high for programmes taught online, as we at Condé Nast College are finding, although it can lead to huge innovation and adaptation and better outcomes for students in some cases.

However, to think that our future in education will be exclusively digital is a mistake. We’re still fundamentally social animals and the virtual world will always be an “and” not an “or”. It cannot replace the human need to get together, and this is a message coming through loud and clear from colleagues and students. There will undoubtedly be more virtual working once we reach a new normal.

Working from home brings different stresses. Colleagues with younger children normally at school or in childcare are finding that their time is even more in demand than when at a place of work and that work is itself significantly more intense. The social element of meetings is gone. No longer do we spend 10 minutes making coffees and chatting. No more can we mentally drift off for a while without being noticed. When those screens are on, they are on. This leads to aspects of greater productivity, especially now that the dead time of journeying to and from work is gone, but that also increases the expectation of things getting done. Working online is exhausting because it is so concentrated on staring at screens and holding rather more stilted conversations.

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A brave new world

Education is not just a means to achieve an outcome – it is also a life experience. To date, not many educational institutions have found a way to make money online. Harvard Business School has had an online operation for eight years and it still isn’t profitable. It’s a very resource-intensive way of working if it’s done properly. There have been anecdotal reports of attendance rates at some institutions actually going up in recent weeks. In other words, more students are coming to virtual classes than attended “real” ones. However, evidence also suggests that the dropout rate is much higher, with online numbers starting high but tailing off.  

We are all learning a new etiquette, the etiquette of Zoom. Some colleagues have been somewhat taken aback by the appearance of students at lectures sitting in bed with a cigarette and a coffee. We are discovering which subject areas lend themselves to online presentation better than others. We use all our senses to learn and online can only go so far without touch, taste and smell. In our case, fashion involves texture – something clearly missing online. Courses on animal husbandry, photographic lighting or carpentry can never be the same conducted remotely. We’re finding that running styling and photography courses online requires great ingenuity. What we’re learning more than anything is how adaptable we need to be.

In this brave new world that’s coming our way, it is crucial not to underestimate the importance of a community of scholars. We will need to expand both the physical and digital in a sustainable way. 

Then there are the students themselves. At Condé Nast College, 60 per cent of our students are international. Universities in the east, particularly China, are aggressively imposing themselves on the market. If young people there are studying at British institutions today by living at home staring at a screen, will their friends and younger siblings want to travel so far when their turn comes? Now more than ever it is vital that we support our students from overseas every bit as effectively as we do those based in the UK.

We can’t expect that, when this is all over, everything will just go back to the way it was. But it would be a mistake to assume that education will forever function without the personal, face-to-face interaction through which it has flourished for centuries. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, education has been a collective experience – it’s about dialectic and that clearly functions best in communities.

We will be together again.

Nick Isles is the interim chief executive of Condé Nast College of Fashion and Design. He tweets at @nicisles