Distance Education

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Educational distancing

Jon Baggaley

To cite this article: Jon Baggaley (2020) Educational distancing, Distance Education, 41:4,
582-588, DOI: 10.1080/01587919.2020.1821609

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Published online: 05 Oct 2020.

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DISTANCE EDUCATION
2020, VOL. 41, NO. 4, 582–588
https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2020.1821609

REFLECTION

Educational distancing
Jon Baggaley
Centre for Distance Education, Athabasca University, Canada

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) is placing impossible Received 15 July 2020
demands on distance education. With the closure of schools and Accepted 7 September 2020
colleges, teachers are being given only weeks to put their courses KEYWORDS
online regardless of their lack of online experience and support online learning; COVID-19
facilities. In the United States of America, international students pandemic; institutional
who fail to continue their studies online have been threatened closures; international
with expulsion to their own countries, where online resources students; best practices;
may be unavailable. The failure of institutions to place their curri­ reinvented ideas
cula online efficiently will be a public relations disaster blamed not
on those who have issued these impossible demands but on the
false premise that distance education methods were ineffective all
along. The article summarizes the problems facing teachers and
students in this situation, and repeats a conclusion expressed by me
in previous reflection articles: that the surest way to make online
learning effective is to consult the decades of practical experience
in the distance education literature.

Introduction
The long-standing tendency for educators to make spurious claims that they have devel­
oped a new form of distance education (DE) is about to reach a new level. At the time of
writing (July 2020) the coronavirus (COVID-19) surging around the world has closed
school doors at every level of education, and the prospects for their reopening are
unclear. The solutions being offered in this crisis will reinvent not just a few DE practices
but the field as a whole. A number of recent DE reinventions have been discussed in
earlier articles in this journal (Baggaley, 2019). These include the 21st-century use of the
term blended learning to describe traditional combinations of face-to-face and technol­
ogy-enabled learning (TEL): the subsequent redefinition of blended learning and classical
home prep practices as flipped learning; the reinvention of large-scale online education
under the neologism MOOC (massive open online course); the resuscitation by MOOC
providers of the 50-year-old educational TV medium abandoned in the 1990s and redis­
covered in the 21st century as though a new idea; and the resurgence of the last decade in
the use of correspondence methods developed a century ago. In each case, the authors of
these “pioneering” techniques have made little or no reference to the existence, suc­
cesses, and failures of the same practices in previous decades. The impossible pressures
currently being placed on teachers to put their courses online within 2 months will create

CONTACT Jon Baggaley jon@baggaley.com

© 2020 Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia, Inc.
 DISTANCE EDUCATION 583

an avalanche of unresearched ideas of this type and will generate a public relations
disaster for DE which should be anticipated as a matter of concern.
In 2013, a group of US educational leaders created a Global Learning Council (GLC)
charged with identifying the best online learning practices. If it has since succeeded in this
task, its conclusions may prove helpful in the current crisis. Hunter R. Rawlings III, the
Council’s co-chair, suggested that the task shouldn’t take long, for as he put it, “there are
no good studies on what constitutes bad online pedagogy” (Global Learning Council,
2013). Seven years later is a good point at which to see if Rawlings was right in his
sweeping dismissal of the DE literature and to seek a progress report on the Council’s
work.
From 2013 to 2020, the GLC has held a series of twice-yearly conferences and has
released a handful of reports identifying three main TEL objectives (GLC, 2015):

● foster a conducive culture that enables the field to thrive;

● facilitate continuous improvement of TEL instruction and tools; and
● build a global community for TEL data sharing.

It has yet to deliver on its promise to define the best online education practices, however;
and in identifying these three goals it has done the DE field no favors. The highly active DE
culture has long since attended to these objectives in discussing the identification,
evaluation, and refutation or adoption of TEL methods; but in seeming unaware of this
the GLC has given DE novices the impression that online learning is a new field in which
their ideas, however primitive, are breakthroughs. Moreover, still waiting for a list of the
poor studies hinted at by Rawlings (Global Learning Council, 2013), we are no wiser 7
years on about the online practices that the GLC dismisses as “bad”.
This is dispiriting news for teachers who now have 2 months in which to place their courses
on online platforms. Universities including Harvard and Princeton have announced that when
they resume their teaching most students will be required to access their courses online for
the foreseeable future, in many cases without a reduction in their fees (Evans, 2020). The
situation is particularly serious for international students with temporary residence in the USA.
If face-to-face courses are not available to them in the September term, they have been
threatened with expulsion from the country by the Department of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement and instructed to continue their studies online from elsewhere (Mulraney, 2020).
This order is oblivious to the fact that many international students are attending courses in the
USA because they cannot access them online in their own countries owing to the lack of
personal computers, Internet, and family resources. A survey at Jawaharlal Nehru University in
New Delhi has determined that 40% of its students have been prevented from taking online
courses for these reasons while their classrooms are closed during the virus’ spread (Press
Trust of India, 2020); and the president of Harvard University has described the Department of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement expulsion order as an act of “cruelty surpassed only by
its recklessness” (Bacow, 2020, cited in Alvarez & Shoichet, 2020). A week after issuing it, faced
with multiple university lawsuits, the US government has rescinded the order; but the
situation is still deeply unsettling for the 1 million international students affected by it
(Bacow, 2020). If they do not have access to both online and face-to-face courses when the
next semester begins in September, the cost of remaining in the USA will become prohibitive.
What are the chances that the full online curriculum will be ready by then?
584 J. BAGGALEY

DE in the COVID-19 era

To prepare for the launch of their online courses, faculty, students and parents are being
given the summer months of 2020 to familiarize themselves with online resources and
conferencing software. The situation is causing “trauma, psychological pressure and
anxiety” (Bozkurt et al., 2020, p. 1). A flurry of videos on YouTube on how to overcome
these problems is emerging (e.g., Gauging Gadgets, 2020; TWiT Tech Podcast Network,
2020); but the task will not be easy. Replacing Skype and WhatsApp as popular video-
conferencing favorites, the current front-runner is Zoom, a free app (up to a point) with
advantages in clarity and multiparty conferencing. As with most apps, however, Zoom has
problems involving log-on, configuration, synchronization, and security, which may well
reduce its popularity when online course work becomes daily and compulsory. Four
months into their effort to switch from studio discussions to online alternatives in their
news programs and talk shows, even the major TV networks are still faltering in their effort
to control all the glitches. If TV professionals cannot succeed in this, it is unlikely that
teachers, parents, and students will be able to do so in half the time.
Undaunted, a flood of new online conferencing products is also appearing on the
market, with promotional puffery parodied in Forbes (Tyre, 2020). When learning online,
Tyre writes:

Children sit attentively at the kitchen table in front of their laptops, absorbed in digital
lessons . . . Listening from a friendly distance, you can hear that an entire school day is
being delivered to your child through a screen, complete with class participation, formative
assessments and graded assignments.

Tyre’s actual opinion of the online learning experience, however, is in stark contrast to
this. Citing a 10-year study of online charter schools by Stanford University’s Centre for
Research on Education Outcomes, she concludes that “the remote learning nightmare” is
“a bad way to learn”, a disaster requiring “a huge amount of parental involvement”, and
that “the children might have been better off if they had never bothered to log on at all.”
Although Tyre’s criticism is extreme, there is more than a grain of truth in it. Creating
online course materials and learning to use them well takes time; and putting one’s whole
curriculum online will certainly take teachers longer than their summer vacation. Even
teachers in DE institutions do not all rise to the online challenge efficiently. Hired for their
subject-matter expertise, they may have little or no aptitude for nor interest in the DE
media they are required to use, and to meet institutional standards for their materials they
typically rely on webmasters and other support personnel who may have a waiting list
lasting months.
So, the enforced effort by teachers to place their courses online in a matter of weeks
will not end well. For many of them the challenge will be precisely the type of nightmare
that Tyre (2020) has described as typical of charter schools. By the end of COVID-19
pandemic’s first year in 2021, the online challenge is also likely to meet Tyre’s criteria for
a disaster. It should be noted that her criticism of “remote learning” was written before the
virus increased the need for DE to serve students at all levels and in all disciplines. The
peremptory demand for teachers to go online is immensely more challenging than it
would have been before the virus crisis, especially for those with no prior online experi­
ence. When the crisis is over and educational institutions are able to end their enforced
 DISTANCE EDUCATION 585

dalliance with online delivery, DE’s reputation as a whole will be associated with the chaos
created by these impossible demands. (One only needs to recall the recent opinions
expressed by the GLC to know this.) The disaster of the online attempt will not be
represented as the fault of the teachers or the institutions but as proof that good DE is
as impossible to create as mainstream educators have always suggested.
The notion of innovation is also being rewritten by the COVID-19 crisis. To motivate
their teachers and support staff, schools and colleges worldwide are setting aside well-
intentioned innovation funds. To DE novices, however, innovation involves a far lower
level of quality than the DE field has developed over 5 decades. This is already being seen
by journal reviewers and editors in the draft articles submitted by teachers who enthu­
siastically believe that the online practices they have devised since the virus closed their
schools are innovations, rather than comparable with methods dating back 50 years. If DE
journals were to publish naïve articles of this type, they would be contributing to the
fiction that DE is a new departure.

Preserving DE’s reputation

Experienced distance educators are being swift to recognize the risks attached to moving
to online education without adequate preparation and expertise. Neil Fassina, President
of Canada’s Athabasca University, writes:

The rush to deliver emergency remote education online by so many institutions has given
some learners a less-than-optimal experience, potentially undermining our message that
online education, when well designed and executed, provides a rich, immersive and enjoy­
able learning experience. (Fassina, 2020, p. 5)

Hodges et al. (2020) discuss the need to regard “emergency remote education” as a purely
temporary measure in clear contrast with the well-grounded principles of traditional DE;
and Bates (2020) stresses the lengths to which teachers and institutions will need to go in
order to ensure that the lessons of DE experience are preserved:

All instructors [will need] to be better informed about the strengths and weaknesses of online
learning: which students it suits most; which subject areas require different mixes of online
and classroom activities; what choice of media to use; how to support students when they are
not in class. (p. 14)

The history of DE has amply shown, however, that failure to meet these goals will cause
educators inexperienced in the field to attribute their problems not to their own lack of
expertise but to inadequacies of the DE field in general. The strength of time-honored DE
principles needs to be emphasized at this time in order to protect the field’s reputation;
and other steps can also be useful, even in the face of the need for immediate solutions.
For example:

● Involve the students in designing the online procedures. They often have more
online expertise than their teachers and can gain a sense of ownership by joining
with them in the current challenge. They will remember the day when they helped to
design the DE of the future.
586 J. BAGGALEY

● Do the research. As teachers and administrators, consult even a small portion of the
published conclusions on how to design DE presentations efficiently. A relatively
short scan of the full and often freely available online DE reports can show a teacher
precisely how to organize efficient text discussions and audio and videoconferences
and can provide references to highly relevant specialized studies in other areas of the
literature. The recent 40th anniversary edition of this journal – Distance Education,
40(4): Naidu (2019) – provides a timely summary of the literature from which to start;
and the Technical Reports section of the International Review of Research in Open and
Distance Learning (http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl) published between 2002
and 2006 discusses best and worst practices for the use of online educational soft­
ware. The media and software evaluated in these reports have changed over the
years, but the features common to the efficient DE practices that they enable have
largely remained constant. With the current pandemic in mind, UNESCO (2020) has
provided an updated list of resources and solutions, perhaps perplexing in its length
and complexity for those who require fast solutions and evaluative evidence.
● Resist the temptation to apply the technique used by the “pioneers” who reintro­
duce old practices under new names and check whether the practices are original
and have worked well previously. New wordings are justified when they reflect a shift
in direction, as in the change from Distance to Distributed in the IRRODL journal’s
name (McGreal, 2015); but it should not be assumed that the term distance is now
outdated. The concept of social distancing in the COVID-19 era is evidence of this. To
give DE a contemporary ring, perhaps educational distancing would be a trendy twist.
But probably not. New terms can be a useful camouflage for ideas copied from
elsewhere, but a change of name for tried-and-tested ideas can wrongly suggest that
there is a problem with them. The only problem with the classic DE emphasis on the
appropriate selection of media and strategies is when it is ignored.

Unfortunately, sweeping, fallacious criticisms of DE research by influential educators such

as the GLC actively disparage the traditional DE literature; and the distinction between
emergency remote education and traditional DE will be meaningless to them. Criticisms of
online learning in widely read outlets such as Forbes magazine (Tyre, 2020) will also
obstruct the attempt to promote its pandemic solutions. Introduced as a “pioneer of online
education” in a recent TV interview about education after COVID-19, President Michael
Crow of Arizona State University has gone some way toward encouraging acceptance of
online methods (Zakaria, 2020). As with the GLC leaders, however, Crow’s statement that
online learning is “a new option” gives the clear impression that DE and online learning are
being initiated by today’s mainstream educators rather than by those who have been
testing efficient DE practices since the early days of correspondence education. Rather than
claiming that online learning is a new option, a more accurate description of it is as an old
option that mainstream educators persistently ignored until COVID-19 forced their hand.
What is it about the DE field that permits its ideas to be constantly denied and
rewritten in this way? It does not happen, to my knowledge, in other subject areas.
A likely explanation is that DE’s focus on the media that communicate its academic
messages constantly changes as new media emerge. It is easy in this situation for new­
comers and commercial interests to suggest that their techniques are original and
innovative without acknowledging their previous existence under other labels. It is highly
 DISTANCE EDUCATION 587

likely that claims of this type will unjustly damage DE’s reputation during and after the
COVID-19 era. Educational administrators can help to prevent this by noting the highly
practical findings of the DE literature while there is still time for them to be applied.

Notes on contributor
Jon Baggaley is a psychologist and Emeritus Professor of Distance Education at Athabasca
University in Canada. His books include Dynamics of Television (1976), Psychology of the TV Image
(1980), Harmonizing Global Education (2011), and Yinyang, Music and Colour (2020). Baggaley’s
videos on media production and evaluation techniques are at vimeopro.com/Baggaley/home/.

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