The global phenomenon of the Covid-19 Pandemic which has included the mass movement of education into an online setting will have long term effects on the educational world moving forward and leave this current schooling generation with serious gaps in their education. I would gladly consider arguments to the contrary.
Even as many in the education world hail this situation as a real opportunity to fundamentally change how we do schooling, I am concerned that as poorly as we have been doing it for the last century or so, this will make it worse.
For the use of this blog, I am going to refer to all forms of online learning as Distance Learning (DL) here. And the face-to-face instruction of students with students and a teacher in a room together will simply be called the Traditional Classroom or Classroom.
Distance
By definition, distance between a teacher and student is an educational obstacle, not an opportunity. I am aware of the ballyhooed benefit of a teacher in Iowa being able to engage with students around the world, but the distance between them presents a net set of difficulties greater than the benefits. In the traditional classroom, we tout low teacher to student ratios as superior to high ones. The class of ten students out performs the class of thirty five. And the modern lecture hall in University that seats seven hundred is full of those who complain they have no connection with their teacher.
Sometimes the difficulties imposed by distance force the teacher to seek solutions that result in better attempts at instruction. In fact, many such strategies used online would be great, if the student was able to handle it. Distance is an obstacle to be overcome, one that most traditional classroom teachers can deal with more easily than those using DL. Much of this obstacle has to do with the remaining issues below.
Autodidacts
Distance learning places a great deal of responsibility on the learner. I believe this is why we started trying it at the top end. The idea is that a college student has gained sufficient intellectual virtue and skills so as to be able to handle the responsibility of self-learning or autodidactic education. Even in the traditional classroom of higher ed, this has been the case, with the professor expecting a great deal of learning to go on via the assigned readings, the writing of papers, research, etc. outside the classroom per se.
To be clear, I love autodidactic approaches to education. But the skills necessary to learn on your own, if not in place, will crush distance learning attempts. This goes back to the distance issue: the teacher is not present to solve the many issues that a lack of skill will bring about. The teacher in essence is demanding something of the student that they have not been prepared to do.
If the call to replace traditional classrooms with distance learning are to be taken seriously, then a return to teaching real learning skills at the youngest grade levels is imperative. But with our desire to make education efficient seems to argue against such. Early ed folks will quickly burn out if they are held responsible for using DL modes to bring about strong young readers with full compliments of math skills, thinking skills, and study strategies. Do we think we can do this online when it has not been happening in the classroom?
Accountability
One of the biggest issues I hear from my colleagues and see in my own DL experience during Covid has been the issue of knowing that I as the teacher have an accurate way to assess what is being learned by my students. There is a broad range of related concerns here: during synchronous learning events, knowing all students are attending to the lesson and not doing some other activity behind their avatar, building online assessments that are addressing higher level thoughts, and then just the plain concern of honesty. Within the walls of a classroom, the teacher is able to monitor these things much more easily than online (see the Distance issue above).
I am not simply “old school” here and unaware of all the gizmos available to try and deal with academic integrity online. I use the Google originality check, Turnitin.com’s powerful help, and other tech to try and help with this, but I would be naive to believe that students won’t always be one step ahead of the tools teachers have for this issue of honesty. Again, the issue for me is the group calling for us to move from the classroom to DL permanently as though such was superior to the traditional way. The fact that we can do it does not prove that we should.
If we had students raised in an ideal culture that loved learning, feasted upon truth, goodness, and beauty, and did not treat education as a job, a game, or a system of grade hounding, then I might concede the point. But we obviously know that students are mostly trying to survive school, that all of them want to be in the top 5% of their graduating class, and that getting an “A” is way more important than learning anything or maintaining any ethical standard. I just don’t think an online “A” is the same as one earned in the classroom.
Shocking the System
Finally, there is the way in which we have had to jump into DL due to a crisis. Many believe that this jump has been a God sent blessing, forcing us out of the patterns of the traditional classroom and all the malaise of recent educational difficulties. This is the school of the future is the battle cry.
I know that in some circumstances of poor performance it is best to practice the notion of ripping the bandage off quickly, of making the pain of change as quick as possible. But education is too cumulative and complex for that analogy to work. If we had philosophically believed that distance learning was superior to the traditional classroom, then we should have approached it incrementally, beginning at early learning and moving it upwards slowly. The fact that we have welcomed DL mostly at the top (college) first brings up the question raised earlier, does the student have the necessary skills to deal with the independent nature of distance learning?
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