Even after the two decades of the Internet’s emergence, the higher education sector has not fully capitalized on the online platform’s efficiency. Online education has remained a small proportion of the overall course/degree program offerings at most universities. While the online platform enables cost and time efficiencies due to its inherent spatial and temporal flexibilities, it also creates efficacy challenges in meeting diverse learning and pedagogical needs. Before the coronavirus pandemic, online education was predominantly deployed in an asynchronous mode, resulting in a lack of effective student engagement, personalized learning, integrity issues, and market acceptance. The Covid-19 pandemic has compelled the widespread adoption of synchronous online education that can remove efficacy barriers of asynchronous online mode. Based on the efficiency and efficacy tradeoffs, a conceptual framework for classifying various higher education delivery modes is presented in this article. The framework can help higher education stakeholders choose the most appropriate delivery mode based on their diverse needs.
Taxonomy of higher education delivery modes: a conceptual framework: JITCAR