Online Learning isn't better or worse, it's different
If you were involved in the world of online education before the pandemic, then the past 18+ months have been...well….interesting to say the least. The debate and dialogue around the efficacy of online education or the pandemic version often referred to as emergency remote teaching has been at times a little fractious. Much has been lost in the fog of significant and challenging events and the many words that have been generated in light of them.
Whatever you believe or think about online education and whatever your experiences are - one thing that most should be able to agree on is that it’s different. It’s different from other forms of teaching and study.
The idea of difference is important. If you teach then the chances are for most that the way you’ve had to teach in the past 18+ months has been very different and unfamiliar. If you’re studying then you will have had to study in a very different and unfamiliar way also.
Online teaching and learning: different approaches and audiences
Online education therefore requires a different approach to teaching that’s sympathetic to the different challenges and opportunities it presents. This understanding has led to different approaches to administering or running online education within formal education contexts being enacted as a consequence. So you often find dedicated online or distance education arms of universities for example that are setup in a slightly different manner to those where all of the teaching is on-campus.
Online education has also often been for a different audience, or a specific audience. In the UK, before the pandemic and outside of the dedicated distance education universities, you would have struggled to find an online undergraduate programme being offered by universities. I remember doing some brief, informal research at the start of the pandemic and I struggled to find more than 10 being currently run.
The overwhelming majority of online programmes being offered were at postgraduate level and were often explicitly targeted at those for whom the flexibility of weaving formal study in and around significant existing commitments was the only way they were able to undertake them.
A different experience and audience during the pandemic
To further draw out this idea of difference, then we can look at the experience of the last 18+ months.
If we were to flip this idea of difference around, then we could say that those who were unfamiliar with online teaching might have taken a different approach to online teaching, an approach that differs from conventions, norms and accepted online teaching practices and understandings.
An approach that was strongly contingent on the fact that it was in the midst of a global crisis. Paul Kirschner in this video, illustrates this well by juxtaposing a well-organised and setup operating theatre in a hospital with an impromptu medical base that’s been setup in a warzone.
We can certainly say that universities were not structured around teaching online, but rather structured in a different manner that primarily supports all teaching taking place on campus.
Then lastly, we can also say with some degree of certainty that the audience for online education is also significantly different in that it was composed of thousands and thousands of undergraduate students.
All of these differences are important, and a good standing ground for debate.
Moving beyond a flawed, simplistic debate
Another difference that often gets the most attention however, is whether online education is better or worse than some other forms of teaching and study. For me this is akin to a question that compares a sports star of the 1960s with one from the present day and tries to come to a conclusion on who is best. There are so many factors and variables at play.
However, what we can say of online education is that through digital technologies communication between students and teachers and students and students is enabled. Online education also provides a platform for teachers to give students opportunities to engage in effortful learning activity.
Online education allows opportunities for teachers to have feedback dialogues, design and enact formative and summative assessments, to explain, model, demonstrate, guide, direct, to check for understanding, manage cognitive load….and I could list many more aspects of teaching and study here that are possible through the range of digital technologies that support online education.
It’s also worth saying that online education does not diminish the ability or scope for people to think, dwell, reflect, write, self-test, summarise & self-explain, draw, imagine, map, practice retrieval, interleave and sleep…all of which are things that help aid learning and are not dependent on the existence of digital technologies (incidentally, in a previous post I talk a little about thinking beyond digital by default)
Now there are differences around how you might approach those things and online education certainly places different demands on learners. It would be unwise for anyone offering a course or a programme to not consider whether the form of teaching and study is appropriate in terms of discipline, age and the learning goals, as well as whether there is evidence of demand from potential learners to study in that way.
But having considered all those things and whether you like it or loathe it, online education has proved itself as a means of teaching and study in certain contexts that has led to learning over a number of years. It will continue to be an option universities and other educational providers have available to them as a means of teaching and study.
Through this mode of teaching and study there is potential to create conditions that lead to learning. The challenge is one of all forms of teaching - successful orchestration and design to create those conditions.
