It takes a village to move online

Broadly speaking there’s a spectrum in online education which goes from a close replication of dry, traditional campus based teaching right through to more active, effortful and evidence-based learning.

The traditional form is all too common and at its worst it features long videos of dense powerpoint slides talk overs, PDF’s and other documents and links, simply uploaded to a LMS with very little guidance or intentional design as to how these elements relate to each other and flow.

This is usually supplemented by synchronous live sessions, delivered in a fashion that is equivalent to a lecture. Lastly, somewhere off in the distance is a discussion board, obviously, this is where students will freely and willingly go to converse, ask questions and construct knowledge….I repeat this is where students will go…ok you get the point.

It would be easy to just criticise those that deliver online education in this way, but I think often they’ve had very little support and expertise to draw on when starting to teach in a way that’s unfamiliar. In fact, there are only a handful of UK universities that have really well-resourced teams of people with the expertise to work alongside educators to design and produce high-quality and evidence-based online education.

In my view, the model I’ve described is the most likely to prevail in a situation that results in closure of universities and remote working. In one sense we shouldn’t be surprised, because it’s an online version of a way of teaching that we know still dominates a lot of campus based teaching. When you add in the extra time, thought and support needed to design effective and active online learning it makes it even more likely.

Another reason why I think this will be the case, is the learning technology itself and in particular the LMS. Like every product it has inherent design characteristics which shape its usage. Trying to design and produce an engaging, active online course on a traditional LMS is notoriously difficult. This is because no digital learning environment is totally neutral and the pedagogy that many tacitly support is a form of the example I gave earlier.

Although there are now new and more social and collaborative alternatives around that could present better alternatives in the short term, the gold rush spirit behind some needs to be tempered somewhat. We would be wise to remember and apply these words from Dewey when thinking about potential solutions:

‘We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for the purpose makes a great difference. And any environment is a chance environment so far as its educative influence is concerned unless it has been deliberately regulated with reference to its educative effect.’

So, sadly my conclusion is our educators have an uphill task to deliver active and effortful online learning at short notice, and having had the pleasure of working with many making this transition I genuinely feel for them. I also feel for students as anecdotally I have found that they can also struggle to adjust to studying in this way without support and encouragement. Their first experience of online learning could be a challenging one.

If we are to search for the positives in a situation like that, then my hope would be that the need to invest in those who design, produce and support high-quality, evidence-based online education is amplified and appears more prominently on the agenda of decision makers.

There’s nothing particularly revelatory about the problems a situation like this presents. The lack of capacity, abilities, adequate technology and support to deliver online education en masse, really come down to a long history of those being low down the list of priorities. I’m not convinced that this is “the” moment for online education, but I hope that one outcome might be the desire and collective will to invest in online education and those who support it becomes more resolute and increasingly shared by the many not the few.