Globally, emergency situations bring the normalcy of any system to a standstill. The recent global pandemic created havoc in every sector whether private or government. Among the worst affected, education was one of the sectors that needed immediate interventions especially in terms of mode of delivery since social distancing was a matter of concern. As a result, no face-to-face education – teaching, learning and assessment activities – was possible. Then, many active members in this field of education started to debate an alternative to face-to-face.
In Sri Lanka, online learning was recommended as a replacement medium to take forward educational activities during the pandemic. In this regard, were we really involved in effective online learning? There is a need for referencing to confirm whether we have correctly interpreted what online education means.
Online learning has been studied both extensively and intensively for several years and countless theories, models and evaluation criteria have been proposed for quality online learning to include online teaching, learning, course design and assessment. The common findings of these studies are that effective online learning results from careful instructional design and planning, using a systematic model for design and development. The design process and careful consideration of different design decisions have an impact on the quality of the instructions.
Not carefully designed
The critical view on online education, as we presume that we have been engaging in at least since the Covid-19 pandemic, is that the careful design process is absent in most cases in the emergency shifts.
The research studies on online learning are to recommend dimensions, within each of which there are a number of sub-divisions, highlighting the importance of the design and decision-making process for online learning.
Among these dimensions, modality, pacing, student and instructor ratio, pedagogy, student and instructor role online, online communication synchrony, the role of online assessments and sources of feedback are considered important features for online learning to be effective (see: LearningOnline – What Research Tell Us About Whether, When and How, and Online Learning Design Options).
This article doesn’t go into defining these terms to provide details about what is given within each dimension. However, it looks for some explanations to highlight the fact that online learning is totally a different practice compared to emergency remote teaching. In online learning, modality varies from fully online, blended to web-enabled face-to-face teaching and the pacing can be self-paced (open entry, open exit), class-paced or class-paced with some self-paced. The instructor role varies from active instruction online to none.
However, what we practise as online learning doesn’t necessarily require us to include some of these conditions or to provide opportunities for instructors of the options. Well-planned online learning is meaningfully different from courses offered online in response to a crisis. Therefore, the stakeholders of the academic community should understand the differences before comparisons are made between these two practices arriving at any critical decisions.
Benefits
The argument here is not to evaluate whether online learning or emergency remote teaching is beneficial to a system, but to avoid the temptation to equate emergency remote teaching with online learning during any evaluations. In this case, emergency remote teaching is online learning that is planned from the beginning and designed to be online whereas emergency remote teaching is a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternative delivery mode due to crisis circumstances. The primary objective in these circumstances is to provide temporary access to instruction that is readily available during crises.
Online learning carries a stigma of being lower quality compared to traditional classroom set up despite research studies showing otherwise. In fact, the transition to online learning under these emergency situations is considered as done in a hurry by partly or totally ignoring the careful planning.These under – planned hurried moves to emergency remote teaching further fuel the perception of online learning as a weaker choice and also the rapid approach necessary for emergency remote teaching diminishes the quality of the courses delivered.
Here, the important focus, however, should be on how well the intended learning outcomes of the courses are achieved. So, the researchers and other stakeholders join hands to fortify emergency remote teaching by incorporating the necessary features into it with careful planning.
Hence, there will be an effective system in operation to face emergency situations which are sometimes natural or they are man-made at times. Whatever the causes may be, the emergency situations will persist forever that is for certain.
So, we will stop confusing ourselves with different practices as totally the same but to think outside standard boxes to generate various possible solutions that help meet the new needs of our learners and communities.
– The writer is a Senior Lecturer at the Eastern University, Sri Lanka
