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This is the third of four posts in a series that argues that the binary between in-person and online is problematic. See the first and second. In this post, I share some thoughts on some broader teaching and learning models that Canadian institutions (and others of course) are considering for Fall 2020.

In answering the question “what does teaching and learning look like in the Fall in the context of COVID-19?” I am interested in three models that exist between fully in-person and fully online. Though I’m focusing on Canadian institutions, some of this may apply to other contexts.

To make my assumptions explicit, I am assuming that some amount of physical distancing will be necessary in the Summer and Fall. I am also assuming that Canadian institutions will rely on guidance from Health experts, and as such will be guided by both federal and provincial recommendations. I’m also drawing from the findings of this paper, investigating the enrolment networks at Cornell, which suggest that eliminating large courses (or offering them online) may not be a viable long-term solution. Based on these assumptions, below are some options.

• Offer all courses online, with the exception of “special circumstance” courses. These may be courses that involve student learning activities that require them to be on-campus (e.g., certain lab courses that cannot be replicated in online settings; certain courses that require in-person activities for professional reasons). The implication here is that there will be less students on campus and that campus will therefore be able to accommodate physical distancing guidelines.
• Use a multi-access course design. A simple version of a multi-access course is one that allows students to participate in a course either in-person or online. For instance, a course may be taught and streamed live, and all participants may engage in both synchronous and asynchronous activities with each other. This design was originally created to enable students to have choice between in-person and online participation based on emerging needs or preferences over the duration of the semester. In today’s context, some students may not have the ability to choose between in-person and online (e.g., the physical classroom can only accommodate X students, but X+Y sign up for it; some students may face travel restrictions).
• Use a blended cohort-residency model with X start dates. Let’s assume X=3. The first cohort (1/3 of the campus) travels to campus and begins their in-person courses. Four weeks later they leave campus and transition to online courses. The second cohort then travels to campus, and so on. This divides the student population in 3 and uses the in-person gathering to foster a sense of community among students. This is the model that most Royal Roads University programs have followed for many years.

There are challenges with these three models. All of them introduce organizational, technological, social, and pedagogical complications. The models are also silent about staff and faculty: when students are on-campus, they not only interact with peers in common courses, but they also interact with others in cafeterias, gyms, dorms, pubs, and participate in the community in the same ways that we all do. There’s also questions of equity, sustainability, and resilience here.

It is important to note that these options are not exclusionary. In other words, institutions could pursue more than one option. They do not necessarily need to adopt a single modality for the Fall – and importantly, they do not need to choose a singly modality ONLY for the Fall with the hope to return back to how things were. Returning to a question I asked in my first post: Is in-person education the best we can do for everyone? In other words, it is possible for an institution to offer its Fall (and its future) programming in a variety of ways, in the same way that many institutions offered some courses/programs in face-to-face ways and others in online formats.

In your opinion, are these three options more or less feasible in your context when compared to (well-designed) online learning? Why or Why not?

I am drawing inspiration from the tweet that follows to write a series of four blog posts. I love and appreciate Hannah’s question (and admire her broader work, which is an exemplar of digital public scholarship), so I’ll take some time to think through some of the issues raised in the question in this series of posts. This first post deals with the face-to-face vs online binary. The second will examine what we mean when we say that a learning experience is “good” or “better/less than.” The third will focus on exploring some broader teaching and learning models that institutions may consider for Fall 2020. The fourth will highlight some specific instances of digital pedagogy that I think are worthwhile to consider. [update: Apr 29: I switched the order of the third and fourth posts]. Now, on to the first post.

Could anybody point me towards articles that argue AGAINST the assumption that an online course is always inherently a degraded version of an in-person course? I’d particularly appreciate work that roots these arguments in specific examples of effective digital pedagogy.— Hannah McGregor (@hkpmcgregor) April 17, 2020

The question is spot on. The online vs. face-to-face debate is heating up. Again. And I suspect that you’ll hear it more and more in the coming weeks and months as higher education institutions try to figure out what to do about the summer and Fall semesters.

Here’s a challenge: Walk into a room (say of academics and administrators) and promptly announce to everyone that online education is inferior to face-to-face education. Most everyone won’t bat an eye.

Here’s a different challenge: Walk into the same room and announce to everyone that face-to-face education is inferior to online education. Not only will your peers bat both eyes, they’ll look at you as if you’re Cronus in the process of swallowing his children.

But, step back from these two arguments, and you’ll notice that both positions assume that modality is the main determinant of what works best. If you’ve ever stepped into a face-to-face classroom that left you yearning for something better – and I assume that most of us have – you should recognize that what makes or breaks learning goes beyond physical co-presence. More importantly, our tendency to view face-to-face and online education as a binary is distracting. It distracts us from improving education and the learning experiences that we are able to offer to students. Not because one modality is superior to the other, but because there is no single modality or learning model that will work for every higher education institution and for every course. Some models work in some contexts but not in others, and no model is best for all contexts.

The debate also ignores much of the nuance around how to best design a course and who the students are. Here’s a simple example to demonstrate how we can quickly get into the weeds. Assume we are designing an online course. Should the course be synchronous or asynchronous? Why? Should it include peer-to-peer interactions and group work or should it rely on independent student work? If it involves group work, what is the most optimal group structure and size? And should such group work rely on loose ideas around collaboration or should it be structured formally as suggested by cooperative learning and social interdependence theory? These kinds of questions – necessary as they are for designing good learning experiences – are absent when the arguments around models focus on binaries.

To return to the tweet: When people argue that face-to-face is better than online, they assume that all online experiences are the same (which isn’t true), that all face-to-face experiences are the same (again, not true), and that by-and-large, all online learning experiences are worse than in-person ones (follows from the prior two untrue statements).

Coming up in the next blog post: what do I mean by “good learning experiences” and what criteria do we use to determine whether one kind of learning experience is better than another?

Below is a short presentation I gave at an online session hosted by the Canadian Association of University Teachers in the early days of the pandemic.

COVID-19 and the Academic Job: Moving Online from George Veletsianos

An oft-repeated narrative that you have likely heard is that Higher Education institutions are dinosaurs that are resistant and slow to change. That’s not entirely untrue, but it’s not an accurate representation either.

“Education is broken” is one of the mantras reformists championing digital technology as a solution use, resting on the assumption that today’s classrooms were pretty much the same as classrooms from 100 years ago.

Yet. Higher education is not immune to innovations. On the contrary, it is often the source of them, and indeed, contemporary higher education is deeply intertwined with changes in society. As societies change over time time, so does Higher Education.

The resilience and changing nature of higher education is on full display at the moment due to COVID-19. Large in-person institutions moved anywhere between 6,000 to 9,000 courses in alternative remote teaching formats in a matter of weeks. Smaller institutions have done the same, at a scale aligned with their size. Anyone who abruptly switched to a new teaching format can tell you that there will be challenges there and pain points there. But everyone involved in this transition deserves major kudos. Regardless of institutional size, this feat is impressive. For those of us who teach in schools and colleges of education, for those of us who prepare educational technologists, instructional designers, digital learning leaders, and educational technology specialists, this is also a moment of pride for the work that our students and graduates do.

So, no, higher education is not broken. It is in a state of transition like it has always been, and like it will continue to be. While this transition, at this very moment, focuses on modality (i.e. the transition from in-person to online/remote), the longer-term transition will focus on other aspects of teaching and learning as well, including ways of assessment, program offerings, and so on. Four hope that I have for Canadian Higher Education (and there may be lessons here for other countries) are the following:

• We collaborate more, rather than compete more
• We use what we know from research on online learning, learning design, and flexible learning to guide us.
• We pay greater attention to pedagogy, open educational resources/practices, and student equity
• We pay greater attention to the learner experience, guided by a sense of compassion and care

Sending my warm wishes and love to all of you.

Last month my colleagues and I were successful in our application for rapid funding from the Government of Canada to address COVID-19. Our project aims to study misinformation flows pertaining to COVID-19 and design educational interventions to address misinformation. We are now hiring for three remote positions for Canadian citizens or permanent residents to work with us at Royal Roads University (2 MA/PhD, and 1 postdoc).

[Update for clarification: Students do not need to be enrolled at Royal Roads University. As long as they are enrolled as students at a University/College they are eligible to apply for the RA positions and will be given full consideration.]

Below are the postings. Please feel free to disseminate these to your networks

Postdoc: https://royalroads.mua.hrdepartment.com/hr/ats/Posting/view/705

RA 2 (Master’s or Doctorate student): https://royalroads.mua.hrdepartment.com/hr/ats/Posting/view/706

RA 2 (Master’s or Doctorate student): https://royalroads.mua.hrdepartment.com/hr/ats/Posting/view/707

This post isn’t about tensions, working long hours to serve our students and our communities, or how-tos. Rather, it’s about how one of the things that COVID-19 reveals is how collaboration and goodwill may help Higher Education respond and react.

A common element in both yesterday’s post and in today’s article that Shandell Houlden and I published with The Conversation, is the simple fact that coming together, helping each other, and collaborating is tremendously beneficial. Addressing COVID-19 and its impacts requires us – universities, individuals, systems – to work together. And we’d be better for it. In this post, I wanted to share some large-scale collaborative efforts that have popped up in the last week or so in Higher Education.

• The instructional design emergency response network “connects institutions and educators to e-learning professionals willing to help convert face-to-face courses or course components to online offerings during times of crisis, such as natural disasters and epidemics.”
• This is a crowdsourced document listing resources from U.S. universities related to planning for COVID-19.
• The crowdsourced spreadsheet that Bryan Alenxander instigated that rapidly grew into something massive.