Let’s talk about the future of online learning.

Short term, we have the following problems:  1) The Fall term is going to be online.  2) Most institutions are not good at online.  3) The effort to go online is immense. 4) The cost of not going online is immense. 5) Institutions are already facing a $ crisis.  

So, given this, who pays the cost?

This is a really good question, and one that does not have a simple answer, mainly because as far as I can tell different parts of academia are in different stages of grief for the Fall term (senior admins, who among other things get paid to plan, are mostly between depression and acceptance whereas quite a large number of profs, who have – understandably – been quite focussed on the basic business of finishing the winter term and are only now focussing on what comes next, are scattered across denial, anger and bargaining).  It has therefore been hard to get much purchase on a common course of action for the fall.  Complicating matters are collective bargaining agreements, which in many cases make it very difficult if not impossible to get units to do anything much in summer months.  Which, you know, fine – a contract is a contract – but students at schools where summer happens “per usual” are going to have a terrible fall semester.  One hopes some amicable solutions can be found to this problem fairly quickly, because the potential for epic failure – and possible subsequent institutional collapse – is pretty high.

But what about longer term?  Some in the EdTech community and the Davos/Davos-wannabe types have spent the last month or so saying that this sudden pivot to “online learning” (deep breath) marks another stage on the “inevitable” move to put all post-secondary education online.  Are they correct?

Well, no, of course not.  With these folks, the actual question is irrelevant, the answer is always “an inevitable move to put all post-secondary online”.  But it’s nonsense.  Education is social.  Students don’t go to university or college just to master content, they go to make friends and seek meaningful relationships with peers and mentorship relationships with instructors.  Online education really isn’t set up for that.  And so, yes, what we are currently proving is that it is possible to deliver this education online, but there’s no evidence whatsoever that there is any increase in demand for online undergraduate education – and that goes for most college programs as well.

In fact, possibly the bigger worry about education come the fall is not the courses so much as it is the support services.  Students who need academic guidance or assistance, students who need mental health support – where will they find it, exactly?  At least in face-to-face classes there can be some instructor-student interactions that can point students in the right direction: those quiet chats are exactly the kind of things that are going to get lost in the kind of online environment most institutions are contemplating.   And given that the need for many of these kinds of support are negatively correlated with family socio-economic status, it means there are some serious equity implications to online education which need to be addressed.

Now that’s just undergraduate education.  What about continuing education, and professional training or professional master’s degrees?  Isn’t there likely to be change there?  Well, it’s certainly likelier that we will see change in this area than in undergraduate studies, but I’m not certain the change will be huge.  But let’s lay out what is probably the optimistic scenario for online education. 

The boom is not going to come the usual way.  In most recessions, these types of education get a boost in enrolments.  It’s not 100% clear that this is going to be the case this time, because it’s not yet clear how long the recession is going to last: if there is a quick bounce-back, there won’t be time to take a long program.  So, the current preference and hence the big market opportunity is for short courses rather than full programs; Coursera reports an eight-fold interest in free courses in the humanities since the start of the pandemic, for instance.  If you have some of those ticked away, get them in the air.  If you don’t, it’s probably too late to develop them now. 

It’s not clear either that the overall market for these services are going to grow post-pandemic What is clear is that potential students in these areas – for the most part mid-career learners – are going to be financially constrained due to the economic crisis.  So, what we have here is an unparalleled opportunity for online continuing education and professional programs to grab market share from face-to-face ones.  To the extent they can offer them more cheaply and flexibly, with the right mix of synchronous and asynchronous elements, one can see some big shifts in delivery come 12-24 months from now.  Maybe even more so if micro-credentials take off the way they should (shameless product plug here).  If your institution currently depends on significant margins in face-to-face versions of these courses, prepare for some of those to be competed away.

But there’s more.  One really interesting aspect of the March scramble was that some professors who had never tried remote teaching before suddenly got thrown in at the deep end…and they didn’t hate it.  Among the many who I follow on twitter, you could sort of see a light bulb going off, something like “yeah, actually, right now this whole thing makes me scream, but I can see how if you had a little bit of time to prepare you could make this work for certain types of smaller classes.”  And this is interesting, because I think it would have the potential to increase the supply of online courses and programs, particularly at the Master’s level.  And this, too, could be something of a game changer.

So yes, there will be some long-run changes to higher education and online learning after the pandemic.  But if you want to know what makes me really hopeful, it’s what might happen to face-to-face learning.  One of the things that is going to have to happen over the next few months is that in order for the fall term to go ahead, professors are really going to have to engage very intensely with their pedagogy.  The shift in format is going to make people think anew about every class, every moment within a class, in a way few do on a regular basis.  And the lessons that get learned in doing so should pay dividends once we get back to face-to-face, too.  Silver linings.

Stay safe, everyone.

This blog is based on last Friday’s webinar, where I was joined by all-around genius Dave Cormier for a chat about online learning. A recording of this webinar is available here. For the duration of the pandemic, we’ll be doing one of these every Friday at 1PM Eastern.  Join us!  This week’s topic is TBA, but hoping to look at some international responses to COVID-19.   

If you are looking for a quick laugh on remote learning, give this a watch  (just make sure your volume isn’t too high)