When the pandemic shuttered classrooms, most professors lacked the digital fluency to make online education work and the familiarity to make it work well. Universities and law schools tried to shoehorn years of resource development and skill building into a few frantic weeks. No surprise, students had bad experiences. Everyone did. But many mistook the disarray and ineffectiveness of crisis remote teaching for proof that online education is second rate.
Their expectation coming in—that distance learning doesn’t work—was fair. Historically, most didn’t. In the past, profit drove distance learning more than pedagogy. Correspondence courses and mail-order degree mills created the myth that distance learning is inferior by nature.
Today, a bramble of technical challenges grows around the gateway to the online learning frontier. Most educators never hack their way through, because the myth tells them there’s nothing on the other side worth fighting for. As a result, students end up experiencing online learning as a buggy, frustrating version of the classroom, confirming their worst expectations.
The myth perpetuates itself. Online fails because it is expected to fail. Online doesn’t shine because no one thinks it can, and the pandemic has only made matters worse.
As schools decide whether to revert to fully in-person classes, they should consider the vast potential of online education, not the dispiriting experience of emergency remote teaching. If professors rush back to the familiar problems of the classroom, they might leave behind the most powerful educational tool the 21st century has to offer.
When online is done right, and equitably, it can be magical, and promote access to legal education. Students trade hectic commutes for mouse clicks that transport them to immersive learning environments. Professors grow superpowers, like lightspeed and self-replication. They can automate paperwork, record targeted lessons for à la carte delivery, and spend more time designing learning experiences. Universities and law schools can move beyond the one-size-fits-all classroom model. Instead of lock-step programs that bore top students and abandon struggling students, they can curate personalized learning journeys.
Today more than ever, online education needs advocates as zealous as its detractors, to dispel myth with science.
Social Science
Studies differ as to whether online works, because most examine individual programs, and some programs are better than others in nuanced ways difficult to quantify. Further, researchers struggle to measure the impact of online teaching, to the exclusion of other variables that affect learning.
Rather than cherry-picking studies that support their perceptions and biases, educators should look to meta-analyses, to see where the weight of the reliable evidence lies.
When the Department of Education did just that, screening over a thousand studies for rigorous methodology, it found “on average, students in online learning conditions performed modestly better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.” According to the DOE, the larger body of authoritative evidence shows that online can outdo the classroom, despite expectations and myths to the contrary.
Innovation Science
Opposing new tech is not always wrong but is often self-interested. In his book Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies, Harvard professor Calestous Juma found that resistance usually comes from those who would lose identity, power, or money if things changed.
Educators who have spent their lives in classrooms may view a shift to online as a loss of identity, control, or job security. Despite their best intentions, they are simply less motivated to wrestle with making online work than they are to embrace the myth that it can’t.
Hostility toward new tech often resorts to myth. It was once thought that the phonograph might be a conduit for evil spirits. Same for the telephone and electricity
. Resistance to online teaching doesn’t share the mysticism of these beliefs, but it shares the sense of mystery—the intuitive concern that electric technology might have dangerous properties we cannot yet fathom. Educators are concerned that somehow students are not able to process and encode while sitting in solitary focus at a computer terminal like they can, say, sitting in the back of a cavernous lecture hall.
But professors need not gaze wide-eyed at Canvas or Zoom as if Nikola Tesla has just unveiled the electric lights at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Online teaching isn’t mystical. According to learning science and experts in online education, teachers can lean into the same strengths they rely on in the classroom. Those same techniques work online.
Cognitive Science
For instance, storytelling remains a teaching superweapon and, ever since humans first painted on cave walls, we’ve learned through story without face-to-face contact.
In a ten-year study of learning and memory that resulted in Make It Stick, cognitive scientists Roediger and McDaniel proved that human connection through storytelling has a powerful impact on learning. Putting information in narrative context imbues it with rich meaning connected to learners’ experiences.
Paul Zak, founder of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont, once measured the brain activity of a movie audience and saw what he called “an amazing neural ballet.” Heart rates rose. Palms sweated. Brains lit up like the Fourth of July. People imagined themselves into the experience of the story, even though the actors were not present in the theater with them. How could this be?
Ever watch a Ken Burns documentary and learn something profound, even though Ken Burns was not on the couch with you? Ever listen to Strange Fruit and better understand the emotional impact of terror lynchings, even though Billie Holiday was not there to sing to you? Ever read George Saunders and learn something about the human condition, even though he wasn’t perched at the foot of your bed narrating the story?
Through story, empathy opens minds, regardless of medium. Zak showed that empathy releases a neurochemical called oxytocin, which makes people “engage in cooperative behaviors.” For this reason, FBI negotiator Christopher Voss calls oxytocin “the bonding chemical.”
Today, professors can tap into the ancient tradition of storytelling as an online teaching tool, and forge human connection despite being in a different room from their students.
In short, give online education a soul, and students will learn.
The Duty to Make Online Work
Educators can’t prepare students to thrive in the digital age while showing disdain for technology or resisting responsibility for digital competency. On the other side of the screen, students can’t prepare to join a profession heavily dependent on digital skills and self-directed lifelong learning while telling themselves and their schools they “can’t learn online.”
Because classroom and online teaching both depend unavoidably on technology, teachers can no longer claim that tech is someone else’s job. Teaching includes the delivery of teaching. It is incumbent on educators to ensure pedagogy does not get lost in implementation, which means, in the modern age, digital competency is a necessary dimension of teaching competency.
In return for meeting the duty of digital competency, online education offers many technological advantages over in-person teaching in shared classrooms. Instead of relying on glitchy classroom audio-video and computer systems they do not control or understand, professors can master their personal online teaching hardware and software to deliver multimedia learning experiences and perfect their own learning environments.
Moreover, the pandemic has taught us we need online skills at the ready. Digital fluency is now crisis preparedness. In the future, we can’t tell students we didn’t see it coming.
Conclusion
Knowledge is not a wave or particle. It does not drift through the air of a classroom and attach itself to students. Students don’t need to take on the expense and stress of a commute to deliver their brains back and forth every day across cities to campuses, like taking buckets to a well. All they need is human connection, and human connection transcends medium and spans any distance.
Scientific evidence supports the view that online’s inferiority is a myth and, if we embrace distance education with evidence-based teaching practices, it can outshine the classroom. If we stop expecting it to fail, it no longer will.
