Blurts

This EdSurge article attempted to make a distinction to help educators consider pandemic education. The article intended to draw some distinctions but was confusing because it began by describing our recent experiences with remote learning which the post described as a quick, low fidelity, mitigation strategy. I take this description to be a luke-warm evaluation. 

However, the author goes on to describe online courses as typically instructionally designed, applied, asynchronous, and self-paced. Just when I expected the online option as the winner, the author then notes that they have a high rate of non-completers and lack engagement.

How about a combination? The author concludes with this summary:

“Will combining the best of remote learning and online learning rival a quality classroom experience? Magic 8-Ball says no. But it will be a lot better than virtually all of the learning currently conducted over the internet.”

My reaction – first, I think it is a conceptual challenge when practices are labeled using common terms. We tend to bring too many pre-existing associations that make an attempt to use such terms in a formal way confusing. I am still trying to decide if distance learning and correspondence study have been reborn as online and remote. 

It seems logical to use aspects of both asynchronous and synchronous tactics when helping students learn remotely. I agree with the author’s assessment of not being required to take either the path of online or remote. This is hardly a novel approach as most classrooms combine teacher-dominated and independent learning.

What seems different about the way the EdSurge piece defines asynchronous online learning involves self-pacing. I take this to mean content has been prepackaged and sequenced with built-in assessments that determine when students advance. I tend to think of such approaches as some variant of mastery learning. Within such a system, students within a class would be at different points within the sequence of instruction and this would certainly be different from traditional teacher-paced approaches. If this is unfamiliar consider how it would work if students were to work independently using the math content of the Kahn Academy. I tend to think of the mix of student-paced and teacher-paced approaches within the same classroom as a flexed model. Again, flex learning as a variant of blended learning, and these descriptions drift into the weeds of vague terms that educators used in different ways.

If the EdSurge writer is encouraging educators to consider such a model, I would be in agreement. I am still predicting educators will be working with students in small groups face to face and online as a consequence of COVID this Fall. The flex model combining distance and remote learning seemed suited to this situation.

I have been wondering if anyone would find a way to evaluate student learning during the pandemic. Obviously, this was an emergency situation with schools having little time to prepare and access from home was inconsistent from family to family. Some schools ended just shutting down early.

I found these data presented in another blog and I thought the approach was quite creative. The data were collected by an organization (Opportunity Insights) who realized that they could access the number of “badges” received by students enrolled in an online math curriculum (Zearn). I am not familiar with this program, but it seems to be an individualized approach used by some schools.

Opportunity insights compared the badges earned over time (before and after students learned at home) broken down by the average income level of families attending multiple schools. The breakdown is by school and not family income. As you can see, there are dramatic differences in achievement.

The blog post I cite offers possible explanations. While these data are important and informative, I don’t find them surprising. I hope this data set ends up published somewhere by the original researchers. One is left to speculate. Are these differences a function of the proportion of students who simply disappeared once everyone learned from home? Would it be possible to determine time on task? What other insights might be provided by educators from these three categories of schools?

These data offer a significant challenge. How might this differentiated be prevented.