Dig­i­tal ac­cess has be­come a make or break fac­tor for lo­cal ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion in­sti­tu­tions as the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has dic­tat­ed that most class­es are now on­line.

The tran­si­tion has come with cost, in many cas­es un­ex­pect­ed.

Pro­fes­sor Clement Im­bert, chair­man of the Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T, told the busi­ness Guardian that the sud­den tran­si­tion re­quired last March was very cost­ly.

“We had to go on­line im­me­di­ate­ly. We had to ramp up all of our tech­nol­o­gy in that re­gard. Li­cense fees, we had to in­crease our li­cense fees sig­nif­i­cant­ly to make sure that the plat­forms that we use were very re­li­able. So we had to have a very ro­bust back­up sys­tem. But we had to… There­fore we had to spend mon­ey on ex­tra li­cens­ing fees, ex­tra soft­ware and hard­ware in that re­gard,” he said adding that their tran­si­tion was fur­ther com­pli­cat­ed by the er­rat­ic in­ter­net con­nec­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty’s head­quar­ters in Tamana.

“The oth­er thing of course is that de­vices for peo­ple. We had to make sure that there was con­nec­tiv­i­ty. Many lec­tur­ers were at home and not con­nect­ed. There were some is­sues with con­nec­tiv­i­ty be­cause in­ter­net is not very re­li­able at our head­quar­ters in Tamana.

“Those peo­ple had to come to Tamana be­cause they did not have con­nec­tiv­i­ty where they were. That was al­so a prob­lem,” he said.

All of these ex­pens­es were un­ex­pect­ed which added to costs at the uni­ver­si­ty.

“We have had ex­pens­es that we did not ex­pect so yes it has put us in a worse po­si­tion that we were be­fore,” said Im­bert

This tran­si­tion was al­so  con­cern for the Col­lege of Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy and Ap­plied Arts of T&T, which was at a cross­roads con­cern­ing what to do with its phys­i­cal cam­pus­es.

“The im­me­di­ate ef­fect of the pan­dem­ic of course was a very sharp piv­ot to on­line teach­ing and learn­ing which re­sult­ed in many of the sites not be­ing ful­ly utilised but still gen­er­at­ing a heavy ex­pen­di­ture re­quire­ment,” said pres­i­dent of COSTAATT Dr Gillian Paul.

This has lead the in­sti­tu­tion which has eight phys­i­cal lo­ca­tions across the coun­try, to ad­just their busi­ness mod­el in the in­ter­est of sav­ing mon­ey which would be oth­er­wise lost in leas­es paid for the cam­pus­es. Es­pe­cial­ly when re­search found that stu­dents had been suc­ceed­ing in the ab­sence of face to face teach­ing.

“There was no sig­nif­i­cant dam­age to per­for­mance as a re­sult of the piv­ot to the large ma­jor­i­ty of stu­dents. So with that con­sid­er­a­tion the board agreed to mod­i­fy our busi­ness mod­el for us to re­duce our phys­i­cal cam­pus foot­print as one of the means of deal­ing with the fi­nan­cial im­pact of the pan­dem­ic,” she said.

“It is not some­thing that can be done sud­den­ly be­cause you need to make sure that you are not com­pro­mis­ing the pro­gramme de­liv­ery at all. And we ex­pect that maybe by the end of this year we would have sort of re­duce the phys­i­cal foot­print at the cam­pus site where we have op­er­a­tions on two floors we might con­sol­i­date on one floor,” said Dr Paul who al­so not­ed that giv­en the large amount of part time stu­dents, on­line class­es would be more favourable even when the pan­dem­ic ends.

“A  lot of the stu­dents have said to us that they re­al­ly are quite com­fort­able with the pro­gramme in the on­line mode, and we do not an­tic­i­pate that all of them would want to come back to face to face be­cause that means the traf­fic the get­ting home late, the not see­ing the kids be­cause our part time to full time ra­tio some­times is as high as 65 per cent part time to 35 per cent full time,” she said.

While COSTAATT has plans to re­duce cost via the re­duc­tion of its phys­i­cal oc­cu­pan­cy, that ship has al­ready sailed for UTT.

Their cam­pus­es at O’Meara and Corinth has been “giv­en up” as the Uni­ver­si­ty sought to re­duce costs, with their op­er­a­tions shift­ed to Tamana and San Fer­nan­do Tech­ni­cal In­sti­tute re­spec­tive­ly.

Re­cent­ly, the uni­ver­si­ty was forced to meet with the stu­dent coun­cil con­cern­ing a planned ad­just­ment to stu­dent fees, while the ju­ry is still out con­cern­ing en­rol­ment num­bers which have been de­layed due to the pan­dem­ic’s push back of Caribbean Ex­am­i­na­tion Coun­cil CAPE ex­ams and re­sults, both of these would af­fect the uni­ver­si­ty go­ing for­ward, but Pro­fes­sor Im­bert was con­fi­dent the Uni­ver­si­ty would sur­vive this time of ad­ver­si­ty.

“Gate fees and the sub­ven­tion from the gov­ern­ment, pro­vid­ing that they are paid on time...the uni­ver­si­ty is in a place where it can sur­vive,” said Im­bert, who was al­so very con­fi­dent in the di­rec­tion the Uni­ver­si­ty had been head­ing with sev­er­al of its cours­es and projects.

While fac­ing sim­i­lar chal­lenges posed to ter­tiary in­sti­tu­tion  CTS Col­lege of Busi­ness and Com­put­er Sci­ence has found a de­gree of suc­cess dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, pri­mar­i­ly due to their quick tran­si­tion to on­line learn­ing.

Ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of CTS Ravi Ra­goonath said the in­sti­tu­tion ac­tu­al­ly en­joyed in­creased en­rol­ment dur­ing the pe­ri­od as the on­line cours­es in­creased the avail­abil­i­ty for stu­dents around the coun­try as he not­ed that stu­dents who pre­vi­ous­ly could not come to its Mon­trose cam­pus for cours­es were now ben­e­fit­ing from on­line ac­cess.

“Our sto­ry is a lot dif­fer­ent. We have ac­tu­al­ly seen an in­crease in en­rol­ment post-COVID as op­posed to pre-COVID,” said Ra­goonath, “we have had good en­rol­ment num­bers be­fore,  it’s even bet­ter now and we see an in­crease in the num­ber of stu­dents en­rolling in our short cours­es. Even in our ter­tiary pro­grams as well, the num­bers are bet­ter than they were pri­or to the start. So what it’s telling us to is that there’s a greater con­sump­tion rate for the on­line pro­grams.”

Ra­goonath said, how­ev­er, while they have seen in­creased en­rol­ment and some in­crease in prof­its, their prof­itabil­i­ty per stu­dent has not in­creased as they have re­duced the prices on a lot of their cours­es, or of­fered short­er cours­es as they are in­creas­ing­ly aware that the eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion of the coun­try has lim­it­ed the spend­ing pow­er of prospec­tive stu­dents.

Sim­i­lar­ly, Dr Paul con­firmed that COSTAATT has al­so looked to adopt short­er cours­es based on the  eco­nom­ic cli­mate

Ra­goonath ar­gued the move to on­line has meant the in­sti­tu­tion is cur­rent­ly pay­ing rent for three build­ings which are not in use.

The shift the on­line al­so proved to be cost ef­fec­tive in this re­gard as they or­gan­i­sa­tion like UTT and COSTAATT have sought to re­duce their rent bill, in their case with a larg­er re­duc­tion in costs.

“We had to move on­line, so what we did, we took out an ed­u­ca­tion li­cense with Zoom which is an an­nu­al fee,” said Ra­goonath,” But it’s not ex­or­bi­tant in the big­ger scheme of things, right? But it’s a lot less than pay­ing rent for build­ing. On­line is a lot cheap­er than it is in the phys­i­cal space,” he said.