In the time of Covid-crisis: remote schooling vs. distance education

Since almost four weeks now, I've been working from home. Because of the lockdown, I'm deprived from a physical infrastructure of the office and social aspects that it brings along. I can still continue working, but somewhat on an ad-hoc basis.

I  can access my email through a web-based system, and in some cases, I can still access my reference material and files, especially if they are on some shared servers hosted by the office. It's cumbersome, though, and I have to do lots of little manoeuvres to get there. Importantly, I can still maintain contacts with colleagues using email but as it's not in a synchronous manner, I lack the social aspects that those contacts normally bring along. To ease that, we rely a lot on instant messaging and conference calls, tools not provided by the workplace. We hop-along and try to do best with what we have.

Since my workplace was not prepared for this, there was not a perfect infrastructure and no habits for  distance working. In the first weeks, it was out of question to contact support staff for technical problems, they were overloaded just with putting the basics in place. For the simplicity of this write-up, I call this remote working.

As opposed to me remote working from home now, I have many friends who work at a distance on regular bases. For example, a friend used to work at Cisco and her team was in 3 different countries - and on two continents! All was in place to support distance working. For them, the whole covid-19 crises is nothing - they can continue business as usual.

I make this parallel because I want to make it clear that when we talk about education and learning in the time of the current Covid-19 crisis, there are two very different cases. Take the example of my friend, it would be like a distance university whose job from the beginning on was planned to be conducted at a distance without the physical place being there.

Then there is my case of remote working which is more like schools now who are trying to come up with ad-hoc plans to deliver education. They are doing remote schooling. They use, like us in my work, some digital tools for communication and collaboration, but even if such infrastructure is in place, it was never intended to substitute the physical place of a school or a university building. Similarly, the purpose of the digital tools in my job was something like; to gain efficiency in communication, transform work, replace paper, to learn new ways of working, to be ready for knowledge society - you name it.

Which brings to my point that I really wanted to discuss: digital education. Or, e-learning like it was called 15-20 years ago, or web-based education, technology enhanced learning - dear child has many names. I personally have been working in the field for 20 years now. There have been different initiatives to deploy new technologies in education and learning, but it has not been with the goal in mind to replace schools and universities with distance education.

The intention was to transform educational practices, to come up with new ways for teachers to deliver instruction, to support students' learning and its assessment. The intention was to transform educational institutions so that they would support the changing nature of society and work, so that they would be better able to teach learners the skills that they need to function in society, life and in their work.

So - what I want to underline is that distance education, which is often nowadays delivered through online, and digital education have two fundamentally different goals. The first one is to deliver education without the physical space, it can happen online or using other ways (e.g. reading books, writing assignments).

In the time of Covid-19 crises, schools would need to do distance education, but we do not have the needed processes, infrastructure, capacity, training, habits, etc. in place. So, all what learners are getting is remote schooling, a bit unfit like my remote working, not perfect, but best we can do under the given circumstances.

However, digital education sure should be able to help us at this moment of crisis, but since it was not actually intended to be used as a tool for distance education, we should be reasonable to what extend we can expect it to do miracles! Also, I wish that in the future, say after the crisis, we do not blame digital education for everything and ditch it as a failure...!

Here is an article about difference between remote schooling and online-learning/distance educaiton.