Distance education has existed for a long time. Think
correspondence courses and the pony express. Education at a distance has
evolved as new technologies have been created. Radio and television played a
role in distance education sometimes used to reach students who were unable to
attend classes in a brick-and-mortar setting. Often the technology has been
used to attempt to reflect as close as possible the traditional instructional
brick-and-mortar models. Early email instruction resembled first correspondence
and then lecture classes. In the mid-90s
a new approach to education at a distance provided an alternative to the
synchronous satellite television and proliferation of satellite dishes that
were used to show that the school was advanced.
Virtual education started, not as a replacement for the
brick-and-mortar school but as a supplement. And primarily was asynchronous. Quick
move to 2020 and the COVID pandemic where schools were closed to help prevent
the spread of the disease. Because virtual education had grown from the first
few programs to over thousands of schools and programs reaching millions of
students and there were many different approaches to online learning in play,
school leaders quickly instituted remote learning options generally with little
thought to preparing or supporting teachers to operate in this new environment
(and I use the term “remote learning,” and not “online learning” here
purposefully). Sometimes they looked critically at the distance learning field,
but more likely just felt if there were lots of virtual education programs it
had to be easy.
Recently we’re seeing a good deal written about remote instruction
with much of it being critical. Rightly so. What was missing, was the clear
statements that online learning isn’t as simple as posting PowerPoint slides
online or recreating the brick-and-mortar class activities in Zoom. And some of
that needs to be owned by stakeholders in the field of virtual schooling at all
levels who have been involved for over two decades, was what is actually
required to provide quality online learning experiences. There are now a myriad
of approaches to online learning. There is not a single instructional approach.
But if you don’t study online learning broadly then it’s like the blindfolded
feeling the elephant and having a limited experience but thinking they know
what an elephant is like.
The educational research on distance education, online
learning, and remote learning all suffers from the same problem. Many
researchers will report their results as generic for all online or remote
learning contexts. That paints the field with a very wide brush and the
research tends to reflect the inherent biases of the researcher. There is a
limited amount of research findings for many different approaches, but seldom
does the research describe the approach used for the subject of the research.
Selective use of research to write about online, virtual, or
remote learning can paint most any picture the writer wishes to portray. And then, that research is used to present a
generic view of the learning, without characterizing the specific approach or
stating that they are not talking about the entire field. In many instances the
author themselves have such limited knowledge of the broader field they don’t
even know what they don’t know.
It is impossible, within the current range of research on online,
virtual, or remote learning to make blanket statements about the field beyond
the observation that online and hybrid instruction can deliver strong results,
but like anything in education there is no guarantee of good outcomes. No
matter what the claim, there’s always some study that shows a conflicting
result. Any claim about the field, other than to point to the diversity, needs
to be tempered with some qualifying statements. A critical look at the tenor of
an article can actually provide the reader with a sense of the bias of the
writer in most cases. A knowledgeable writer will state their bias or
experiences to help provide transparency and provide the reader with
perspective.
