In 2005 the Distance Education degree program was initiated, proudly the number of students rose from 7,000 to more than 40,000. UNAM the 4 years has had people working on including online activities to the face-to-face programs, so many of UNAM's programs are offering online courses for their traditional modality students. The number of students in the country in 2018 was 4 million students in Higher Education, of which 700,000 were studying in the Open System or Distance Modality, so in Mexico it has worked very well.
The Covid-19 pandemic has not modified the way of working in the institutions that already had the distance modality, they continue working in the same way, the only difference is that the people who were working in the university building are now working from home, while some institutions did not have the modality, now they have seen the need to make changes to continue with their activities for teachers, students and administrators.
UMass and UNAM are two universities for which it will be very easy to adapt to the new normal. This pandemic has shown that families, especially from Latino, African American or families that have less economic resources, are quarantined with 4 or 5 people and do not have the bandwidth or the proper equipment to allow everyone to be connected and take classes from home.
What is the new normal? We are never going back to 2018 and how are we going to make that future equitable and successful; Collaboration between universities is a point of the new normal after the coronavirus, regarding quality, we are using technology with which we are defining new ways of learning for our students.
Universities in Mexico are having as many problems as private universities, our government is reducing the budget for education, we have used the support of television and professors who have continued to work in this way, although they have been asked to do much more with half the budget, we are looking for public and private universities to collaborate together to offer resources, content and some courses for teacher training in the modality for free. Seeking to create for the first time a truly international form of distance education with new technologies that make it much more robust, turning around some of the limitations of the original online versions that were not very participatory, which by their nature could not be. These new technologies are highly participatory and high fidelity.
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