High schools, colleges and universities alike are slowly being allowed to reopen. While educators have previously been struggling with making the switch to online classes, now they’re trying to answer tougher questions involving schools reopening amid pandemic.

When exactly should schools reopen? Should they open to all students, or only those who need to use school facilities for their learning? And of course, the question of what safety measures need to be put in place. The answers to these questions can’t be taken lightly, as they’ll affect at least 1.4 billion students worldwide.

The traditional grading scale in learning, as we know it, is facing an existential crisis. Universities and colleges have now moved most of their activities online and are currently engaged in distance learning. As with most things in life, the reality is that education technologies come with their fair share of pros and cons.

Unfortunately, some students are finding it harder to gain an education under these circumstances. Some face technological problems, like when students don’t have equal access to computers or reliable internet connections at home. As governments enforce lockdowns, students are suddenly restricted to home environments that might not be conducive to their learning. Some are forced to balance their education with providing care for younger siblings or ageing parents. All the while, many suffer from the lack of strict schedules that once gave them stability.

Over the past five years, we have made plagiarism detection more reliable and more intuitive for more than 1,000 education institutions across the globe. 

Today, I am pleased to announce that Unicheck has joined Turnitin. Together, we will further promote academic integrity by investing in technological excellence. 

Google returns about 2,410,000,000 results for the “new normal in higher education,” which is a clear indication of how vital this question is.

Some are saying that old teaching methods will have to vanish, giving way to the tech-savvy instruction. Some predict tougher competition among higher education institutions as they struggle to grow enrollments and make admissions less demanding.

To help us avoid getting lost in this round-the-clock news stream, we’ve reached out to a highly experienced specialist in making predictions based on demographic, political, and economic data.

Meet Bryan Alexander, Senior Scholar at Georgetown University and author of Academia Next,  The Futures of Higher Education.

Despite all the challenges that 2020 has already brought, or better to say due to those difficulties, Unicheck has united the team on the front line for our users. We continue to actively develop newly requested functionality that will help you get the most out of plagiarism prevention in the new, fully online teaching routine.

You’ve been under a lot of stress lately, searching for ways to maintain a stable work environment. To help in this area, we’ve continued to enhance the Unicheck engine as well as its server capabilities.

Our team is currently receiving many customer requests related to license expansion or opening new ones. Given that all the work you’re doing has migrated online, we do realize that service scalability has also gained urgency. Here’s something that can reassure you that checking piles of student submissions remains unaffected, stats taken from our system:

Hardly anyone is born with the feeling that learning is important. It’s something that many of us are likely to embrace after high school graduation or even later. Who holds the key to student motivation so that they can be engaged in the knowledge discovery process? Surely, parents and instructors are involved. They can eventually help students establish their goals and find the pathway to reach them.

Here’s when fellow students also contribute greatly by showing their interest toward studies and the progress they make.

To see the world of academia through the eyes of a student and better grasp their potential motivation drivers, we’ve connected with Daniel Wong.

Science, medicine, education, and culture form the backbone of every nation and state. As fractures occur here or there, we must be prepared to struggle and fix them.

The issues with higher education enrollment and traditional vs. online education are resurfacing. The current reality has unveiled all the malfunctions that somehow worked in face-to-face classes, and they have now transformed into enormous roadblocks after institutions have switched to online learning.

Today, students are showing less trust in education, and this hasn’t happened overnight, of course. Most of them are searching for online education, but they are not as much interested in obtaining online degrees.

Traditional academia is gone. We don’t need to be in a specific location to be learning. A couple of clicks and we’re already “in the classroom.” Technology plays a vital role in this change. What’s more, Generation Z, for whom tech has been an integral part of their lives since birth, are now students. Not to mention, “life-long learning” has become a new normal too. All these scholars have added a lot of work to academic institutions as they digest information differently from previous generations, and value mobility and freedom of choice over restrictions.

Without a doubt, these times are new and stressful for all of us. And even more do we want to keep in touch with you and do our best to help you go through these uncharted territories stronger, smarter, and even more professional than before.