“It’s 2022, and the coronavirus has at long last been defeated. After a miserable year-and-a-half, alternating between lockdowns and new outbreaks, life can finally begin returning to normal,” as David Leonhardt writes in The New York Times.
“But it will not be the old normal. It will be a new world, with a reshaped economy, much as war and depression reordered life for previous generations.
“Thousands of stores and companies that were vulnerable before the virus arrived have disappeared. Dozens of colleges are shutting down, in the first wave of closures in the history of American higher education. People have also changed long-held patterns of behavior: Outdoor socializing is in, business trips are out.
“And American politics — while still divided in many of the same ways it was before the virus — has entered a new era.”
The rest of the article is here.
Jeff Pelline's Sierra Foothills Report 
Interesting article! Thanks Jeff. A Lot of plausible speculation, perhaps a bit optimistic about the fitness of a Biden administration (for which I plan to vote) to lead progressive change, but the times are certainly ripe — maybe over-ripe — for progressive change. There are still so many uncertainties that can confound any speculation: Will a corona vaccine confer long-lasting or only short-lived immunity? Is SARS-CoV-2 just the first of many more novel viruses to come? Will we continue to have the sort of large-scale economic instability that invariably results from high-levels of inequality?
And just to drill down a bit on higher education and the problem of remote learning, our son-in-law, who’s in charge of implementing remote learning technologies at Northeastern University in Boston, can attest that things don’t look too rosy at ground zero. He sent us this article a day or so ago:
“Colleges Say Hybrid Courses Will Make the Fall a Success. But Will Students Get the Worst of Both Worlds?“
Whoops, sorry, I just realized that the Chronicle of Higher Education article I cited above requires a subscription. So, here’s a bit of the beginning of the article, to give you an idea of the problem:
Sac State began experimenting with hybrid classes about 15 years ago. Their version was prerecorded podcasts (and later video) followed by in person lab sessions. The Communication Studies Department implemented it with some general education classes like public speaking, of all things, and later expanded the course offerings to most of the general education classes they offered. The lectures were on line and the labs were for speech giving and testing. Some students liked it because it allowed them to time shift the lectures, but most did not as the lectures were boring and canned with no student interaction and, typically, no one would show up for speech days except those giving speeches. The lab sessions were mostly assigned to part time lecturers who were, in essence, demoted from normal classroom instructors to speech graders and had no say in the content or how it was delivered…ie. not happy campers as they had to deal with student complaints about curriculum over which they had no control.
Yuba College was a pioneer in this arena and has been doing online classes for decades along the same lines as outlined above..optional in-person or on line live video with phone call-in capability. Again mixed results with a lot of drops from the on-line students. It seems that a certain type of person does well with the on-line option and others need the in-person face to face situation in order to succeed.