The compromise of emergency remote teaching
Posted on: April 5, 2020
Many resources and opinion pieces emerged since schools and education institutes urgently went online in response to COVID-19. But I think this one is the most important.
Edubloggers, teachers, and other experts have shared tips, ideas, and strategies for home-based learning. That is good for the immediate need even though this also creates a lot of noise. However, relatively few rise above and look at the bigger picture, e.g., how is urgent home-based learning different from e-learning or distance education?
Facilitating online learning is not the same as face-to-face instruction. Certainly there are overlaps, but facilitating online learning is much more difficult. There are entire programmes of study that are dedicated in part or in whole to learn how to begin doing this. So the rush to “convert” face-to-face and classroom-based teaching to online and home-based learning is bound to suffer in quality.
The article I highlighted described how emergency remote learning compromises on learning:
“These hurried moves online by so many institutions at once could seal the perception of online learning as a weak option, when in truth nobody making the transition to online teaching under these circumstances will truly be designing to take full advantage of the affordances and possibilities of the online format.”
Why might the quality of courses, instruction, and learning suffer?
Typical planning, preparation, and development time for a fully online university course is six to nine months before the course is delivered. Faculty are usually more comfortable teaching online by the second or third iteration of their online courses.
In his reflection of the same article, A J Juliani said that he was still making errors despite years of experience facilitating online learning. What of teachers forced to do something they have not been prepared to do?
We can rationalise the need to rush teachers towards emergency remote teaching. By the same token, we should also recognise the effects it might have on teachers, e.g., increased stress, lowered morale, poorer impressions of e-learning, all because of the forced circumstance of emergency remote teaching.
So how might we respond logically and prudently when we have time to catch our collective breaths? I say we agree to compromise:
The need to “just get it online” is in direct contradiction to the time and effort normally dedicated to developing a quality course. Online courses created in this way should not be mistaken for long-term solutions but accepted as a temporary solution to an immediate problem.
I anticipate that the collective breath will be accompanied by a sigh of relief and the return to the previous normal. We need that compromise to explain why the temporary solution to an urgent problem did not provide valuable lessons on how to operate outside the timetable, classroom, and curricula.
Another dot in the blogosphere? 
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