10 minute read
The year learning went wild
by CMI_
COVID-19 forced educators and learners out of the classroom and into the great unknown: blended and hybrid learning. As we tiptoe back to normality, three top education future-gazers reveal the lessons learned along the way
WORDS / IAN WYLIE
Isn’t it gratifying to be proved right? The desperate and hasty flight to remote learning during the early months of the pandemic provided some belated vindication for long-time advocates of blended and hybrid learning, who had long despaired as online learning was dismissed as the poor relation of “the real thing”.
Not that all the teaching and learning delivered online over the past 12 months has been of the highest quality. But at least teachers and learners have now seen and understood what technology makes possible.
Inevitably, there will be pushback – an initial desire to return to “the real thing” by rejecting remote learning and reaffirming the value of exclusively in-person teaching. A University of Cambridge survey of staff and students revealed dystopian fears of teaching delivered through virtual reality headsets, courses chopped up and sold off in bite-sized components, and the death of the traditional student experience.
The backlash to blended learning will come. But it’s unlikely this particular genie can return to its bottle, now that so many have tasted edtech’s exciting potential. They have glimpsed how technology can shoulder much of the heavy lifting, freeing up educators and learners to engage in more interesting, productive and even fun social learning projects, from all-night hackathons to immersive study visits.
Educators are also grasping the opportunity to throw open their doors to a wider, more diverse range of learners. Birmingham City University, for example, has launched a flexible online nursing degree aimed at widening access into the profession for people who may have thought about nursing but couldn’t balance study with other commitments. Likewise, the University of Suffolk will be continuing its blend of online and face-to-face learning post-COVID after finding that the mix has worked well for its large proportion of mature students and those who work part-time.
Not all post-COVID attempts to introduce blended learning will be successful. It will demand thinking that is designled, student-centred and accessibility-focused. So, ahead of research that CMI will be conducting later this year, we asked three leading thinkers to share their thoughts on the building blocks that need to be laid for an effective and sustainable migration to blended learning.
Professor Diana Laurillard is chair of learning with digital technologies at the Institute of Education at University College London, which has launched an online course on blended learning skills for teachers.
During the pandemic, people learned that there is more to online learning than they thought. They discovered its benefits and found that there are some things you can do better online than you can do face to face, such as being able to engage a larger number of learners in discussion. Many students are shy or hesitant to take part in a class discussion, but online they can be more confident and take their time.
Online also means not having to rely on the teacher to do all of the feedback thanks to automated quizzes or through an online peer review process where learners swap and critique each other’s work, according to a rubric. That can be a very valuable process, which also improves the quality of final, assessed work.
There are many ways in which an online environment can help to personalise learning. However, there are still occasions – such as small group projects where the dynamics of social interaction are crucial to thinking and problemsolving – when a video call on Zoom or Teams cannot replicate the experience of a conversation around a coffee table.
Technology is rarely invented to support the teaching and learning process. Educators find themselves having to borrow and adapt technologies that were made for business or gaming. That’s partly because in universities and other large educational settings, the senior managers are rarely close to the teaching function. They’re not asking, “What does it take to teach? What does it take to learn? And how can technology help?” My great hope is that this will now change given the greater involvement of all teachers in thinking about online learning.
We have also discovered over the past 12 months that online learning is not cheap. Blended learning means more design work for the teacher. There is more upfront investment required in designing what you want and need students to do. But after you’ve designed it, it can eventually run itself. So, there is a payoff… but it’s in the long run.
In effect, teachers need to learn to act like designers, and also learn to share their ideas within their community, testing them out and building on each other’s work, in the same way knowledge is built in science and scholarship. Teachers ought to be able to work like that. “Educators find themselves having to borrow and adapt technologies that were made for business or gaming”
Thomas Arnett is a research fellow in education at the Christensen Institute, a San Francisco thinktank focused on disruptive innovation.
The conventional approach to education takes a bunch of people of the same age, ideally with the same level of background knowledge or experience, and sits them in front of a teacher who provides the instruction to that group. That has long worked as an effective and pragmatic means of providing education to large groups of people.
But different people have different needs. They come with different levels of background experience, different cognitive strengths and challenges, and different motivations for wanting to learn. An effective teacher can try to bridge that gap, adding a personal element to this one-sizefits-all monolithic system. But the system remains monolithic, aiming to give everyone the same learning at the same pace at the same time.
As we exit this pandemic, we have an opportunity to create a better system. Instead of expecting learners to adapt or conform to the system in order to learn, can we make a system that meets the needs of the individual learner?
Student-centred learning doesn’t mean just plugging people into computers to programme their brains. But online learning does make it possible for learners to receive a more individualised experience through self-directed learning. It also frees up the educator’s capacity; instead of feeling pressured to cover a certain amount of material in their sessions, they can ask, what are my different students’ needs? How do I engage with them individually, to find out and better understand their needs, their motivations? And can I design a learning experience that meets those learning needs?
Technological infrastructure is fundamental, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. Technology can assume some of the role of explaining foundational content in an engaging way and give students basic feedback on their understanding. But the real power lies in the freedom this gives educators.
It’s a very different approach to the educator’s practice and mindset. Their role is not to dispense information to a group of people and answer their questions, but to provide them with the resources to explore. It’s about co-designing that learning experience with them, according to their needs.
Learners need a new mindset too – shifting from just turning up and waiting to be told what to do. It gives learners responsibility for deciding when and how they are going to learn. So, learners will need to be coached in this new approach and given guidance in creating structures to help them learn on their own. But in the end, it will be more motivating for learners to have a purpose for learning as opposed to learning because someone told them to do it.
While the past 12 months have introduced people to new ideas, concepts and technologies, we’re also seeing with online learning and distance learning what often happens with new technologies. The early cars were modelled on horse-drawn carriages. The first movies were filmed stage productions. We must break the habit of simply translating an old medium into a new technology. We have to redesign the system architecture to full realise the benefits of these new learning technologies.
Rebecca Montacute is research and policy manager at The Sutton Trust, a charity that aims to improve social mobility and address educational disadvantage.
The pandemic has brought to the fore many of the inequalities that were already affecting students. But these inequalities have had arguably more impact this past year. We’ve found through several different surveys that students from poorer families, on average, are less likely to have the technology they need at home, less likely to have internet access and less likely to have an adequate study space.
There are some steps that can be taken to address those needs – we can buy learners a laptop and internet access through a dongle – but there are some things we can do little about, such as whether or not they have a study space at home or what their general housing situation is.
The UK government has tried to address some of these needs, but it acted far too slowly. At the start of the pandemic, Ofcom estimated that up to 1.78 million children in the UK had no access to a laptop or other computer. The numbers of laptops that the government provided during the first half of the crisis was in the hundreds of thousands, not coming anywhere near what was needed. Remember, even where learners do have a computer in their house, they might have to share it with multiple siblings. So that 1.78 million is a large underestimate of the actual number of laptops needed. In February this year, the government announced it had distributed one million laptops and tablets for disadvantaged children and young people. But it’s still not enough and didn’t come when it was needed, months ago.
These laptops and tablets are now in the school system, but it’s a cautionary tale as we consider more blended learning in the future. There are some difficultto-fix things around housing and access to study space that must be kept in mind when designing blended learning. Being in a school environment gives learners more equal access to good study space.
While the government has now confirmed that teacher-assessed grades will replace exams this summer, it doesn’t have any way to specifically take into account the learning loss of disadvantaged young people. If a learner hasn’t been able to access the necessary materials, for reasons outside of their control, there is no method for making allowances for that lost learning. This could affect their access to college or university. And if they do make it to college or university, will they have access to additional support to help them succeed and fulfil their potential?
We’ve noticed too that during this period of online learning there has been a significant fall in participation in activities such as student societies and clubs, with a bigger decrease among learners from disadvantaged backgrounds. These experiences are really useful for employment and developing wider life skills. Again, young people will need support to make up for that loss, which could have serious knock-on effects on their employment prospects.
The response needs to be a multi-year approach. Universities and colleges must take into account all that lost learning when they make their decisions and offer leniency and support to students who should be allowed to continue onto their next steps wherever possible. Employers too must continue to take into account what these learners have experienced and their lost learning, remembering that it doesn’t necessarily reflect on young people’s talent or potential. They shouldn’t have their futures blighted because of what has happened over the past year.
EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENTS HAVE SPRUNG UP DURING THE PANDEMIC
In Berlin, management school ESMT has transformed three auditoriums into “hybrid classrooms”, kitted out with huge video walls, intelligent microphones and tracking cameras so that it can offer similar learning experiences to both remote and in-person learners. At the University of Lausanne, a new Sony analytics tool extracts handwriting on the board for students to see whether they are learning online or in the room. Radiography students at Teesside University have been conducting remote experiments using a simulation tool that was built in-house.
Investors are certainly excited by all this. Venture capital investments in edtech more than doubled to $16bn in 2020, according to consultancy HolonIQ.
