Earlier this week, Southern New Hampshire University published an article by Dr. Gregory Fowler,  global campus president for SNHU. I always admire Dr. Fowler’s thoughts on disruption, innovation and education, and this piece stood out to me not just as an educator but as a freelance writer as well.

I see that higher education has changed in the 20 years (yikes, really?!) since I took my first college class, and I see that it has changed even more in the nearly 10 years that I’ve been on the other side of the classroom. Technology, the game changer here, has also become a game changer in the work that my BA prepared me for: journalism.

We see newspapers crumbling, TV news roaring ahead at insane and harmful paces, and we even see sites like Reddit becoming sources and guides for journos working on story ideas. Technology has changed how the world works, or at least how the developed world works, and these times (#Coronavirus) are giving everyone a chance to see how tech can help them do their jobs — like it or not.

A few days ago, I said I felt a bit smug about the security of my professional world being a digital one. That was probably a crappy way to word things, but it was true. I felt good about my work life amid the instant changes others were dealing with. Yet at the same time, I know that even the online world is in for a series of real disruptions over the next few months. It’s not just the education sector that is feeling rattled; offices that can are now put in the position of granting work-from-home status to employees despite years of saying no to such things. I’m happy to see this happen; in fact, I left my last desk job because I could not work from home, although my job required that I sit at a computer all day…which I could do at home.

As the world around us shifts in a new way during what is for many the first week of working from home, I’m curious to see just how much it will impact the ways business as usual moves forward. Will the meme I saw last week prove true? I don’t remember the image, but the caption said something like “Working from home/Time to see just how many of those meetings could have been emails.”

I don’t want to wish cabin fever and the confines of social distancing on anyone in a bad way, but what if this disruption could ultimately get more people IN school, as more schools put in place eLearning structures? What if it could get more people OUT of the office while still working?