Online learning doesn’t actually suck (if it’s done well)

I recently read an article by a senior academic who claimed that online learning allows no opportunity for connection or deep thinking. I found it pretty insulting, if I’m honest. All those online classes I’ve taught, over many years and with hundreds of students, reduced to something that simply lacked everything face-to-face learning offers.

There is magic in gathering together in person to learn; I don’t deny that. But there’s also magic in bringing people together when they aren’t or can’t be in the same physical place.

I’ve taught lessons that have brought together students from the furthest-flung places, on almost every continent, from Shanghai to Tallinn, Australia to Peru. Using the breakout rooms function in Zoom, I can split these students into smaller groups to debate the finer points of international education. When it’s time to bring the class back together, I click a button – 60 seconds later, my students are sucked back into the main room, some of them mid-sentence, so absorbed by the discussion that they hadn’t noticed the call to regroup. What have I lost there, really, in terms of deep thinking and connection?

The idea that online learning lacks connection, that it can’t support the kind of deep thinking we do in face-to-face classes, is harming education. Because online education isn’t going away, and the idea that it will never be great allows experienced and talented teachers to rest on their laurels, refuse to learn new ways of conducting a class, and fail to see the opportunities right in front of them.

It's a cop out. And it props up an approach to online education that is appealing to (some) institutions because it cuts costs – that is, if we treat an online course like a glorified e-book, simply delivering the same content over and over again to new batches of students, we save money on re-employing educators. So that attitude – that online learning is just content delivery without connection or deep thought – is doing people out of work.  

Online education has another major benefit too – access. In online courses, we can remove some barriers to access for students in remote places and with disabilities. Students who otherwise could not take part in a course can. Of course, there are other accessibility issues that come with online learning and face-to-face is better for some students. But the idea that an institution or the system has to choose one or the other is spurious.

A well-designed online course isn’t just about the delivery of information. Good online educators use the tools available – which are varied and ever growing – to create opportunities that involve deep thought, questioning, and transformative learning.

I am supremely lucky: I learned to teach online from a group of incredible educators who had already made it their mission to do online education in a way that felt meaningful. They taught me to use games and icebreakers in my video conferencing sessions. We figured out how to make it easy for learners to meaningfully contribute to class. We thought about differentiation and access and all of the ways online learning can be made more inclusive. We encouraged questions, criticisms, debate. And we designed activities that supported students to delve into the topics we cared about. As a result, we produced graduates who could think deeply about teaching and learning.

I understand the desire to cling to what once was. I’m of the generation whose education started with limited access to computers (my Grade 3 classroom contained a single computer, the first I saw in my school life) and moved on to the reliance on technology we experience today.

I also trained and worked as a teacher in face-to-face classrooms, and I know well the magic of getting a bunch of relative strangers together in one place to learn. But I also know well the stench of adolescent cologne and perfume, and the headaches they give me. I know the spread of germs and the sick-exactly-every-three-weeks of teaching. I know that for people with some kinds of disability and chronic illness benefit enormously from online learning spaces.

And I know what it looks like when students take part in an online course that is designed with connection and belonging in mind. I know how they make friends. How they help each other get jobs. How they keep in touch with each other long after their time with me. I know how it feels when your students come back to you years later and say thanks, or I just wanted you to know that you made me think differently, or I finally got that hamster we talked about. You can’t tell me there’s no connection in online education. I’ve lived it.