For anyone involved in education right now, be it student, administrator or teacher, it is quite clear that education quality has severely dipped due to the COVID situation. And while the process of “digital transformation is not a novel phenomenon”, the speed at which it has been made to occur this year is unheard of. Digital technology incorporation “in higher education that would typically take many years because of differing managerial regulations were presented quickly within [a] limited number of days” after the COVID pandemic set in (Adedoyin, 2020). This rapid evolution skipped over the usual development of new learning methods that would occur outside a time of crisis. Without the two decades of experimentation with digital remote learning, it is likely that academic institutions would have stalled into complete failure and disarray. It is now the job of educators and policymakers to go back through the hodge podge systems that have arisen over the past half year and combine them with the existing history of remote learning. With some additional new elements in the mix, remote learning can become the viable alternative to in person schooling that it has the potential to be.
Further delving into the creation of online learning during COVID, it seems that the changes that have shifted the learning environment to online are not just hastily completed, they are an incomplete metamorphosis. First and foremost, the remote learning of today is simply a band-aid fix. The ERT practices put in place by colleges guarantee that the current online classrooms are not fully thought out. Furthering this point, it isn’t common knowledge that “adequately planned online learning experiences [differ] from courses presented online as response to crisis” (Adedoyin, 2020). Most educators have little to no prior experience dealing with an online classroom environment. In a September 2020 survey conducted by HEDS, around 10,000 college faculty and staff were asked how they felt about teaching in an online environment. A large majority of respondents reported feeling that they feel uncertain about the well being of themselves, their students and those around them. Additionally, they expressed major worries about the future of their colleges and the effectiveness of current online schooling. Those in charge of the current situation feel unsure of the quality and capability of an online education. Change is unlikely to come from the higher levels as they don’t have much faith in the future of remote learning. Now the question is how can we make educators realize the potential of digital education without their views being clouded by the poor school performance of COVID education; which will be further divulged into in the following sections.
Figure 3 Above: Percentage of Faculty/Staff that experienced different types of worries in the midst of COVID schooling (Blaich, 2020)
Another major roadblock to completing this metamorphosis to a flourishing remote learning environment is that it is almost universal that higher education institutions hold many pessimistic views of what digital transformation looks like, which are often unfounded when compared to the realities. This isn’t just from the aforementioned lack of faith due to the COVID situation. It is borne of much earlier attitudes; ones that have simmered under the radar as digitalization is often swept under the rug or seen as a side operation to higher educators. As mentioned earlier, in a 2019 study, Michael Kopp defined five major common assumptions that higher education institutions hold that prevent digital transformation. As an aside, ‘digital transformation’ in the context of education refers to the “ the sum of digital processes necessary to achieve a change process that enables [higher education institutions] to successfully leverage the use of digital technologies” (Kopp et al., 2019). The first major assumption is that many organizations believe that digital transformation is a fad and not a movement with real societal impact. In reality, digital learning has the potential to be a comparable alternative if done correctly. Digital learning isn’t just a buzzword or a marketing strategy, it is a real meaningful alternative. If it was so fleeting, it wouldn’t be pursued as a developing alternative for the past two decades. Digitalization is still in its infancy, and COVID has demanded that its growth be accelerated. If Lafayette doesn’t stick to continuing developing this after the pandemic, a year’s worth of mediocre digital education will have occurred fruitlessly.
The second major assumption is that digital transformation has to be quick. Many education institutions see that they are behind in the process of transformation, and then rush to make changes quickly. This is unhealthy as it will lead to half baked processes and underdeveloped learning environments. A prime example of the poor results of this line of thought is the situation we face today, in which every school skipped development and was forced to implement rudimentary online systems. ERT was an easy write off, and it is a failure to both the students and faculty taking part in it. Digitalization is a process, not a single decision point for professors and policymakers. It takes time to retrain students and their teachers to cooperate and learn effectively online. It also takes time to properly equip all students with equivalent access to the school resources, technology and internet that form the platform that digital education stands on. Underserved students often fell by the wayside over the past year due to external responsibilities, and pushing for a fast adjustment will keep them in that underserved position (Blankstein, 2020). It is the moral responsibility of colleges and universities, including Lafayette which values the student experience so highly, to provide an equitable and valuable education experience. Thus, as much time and consideration as possible should be inputted by decision makers in our community.
The third assumption surrounding is that higher education institutions often buy into the idea that digitalization is merely a technical issue that better technologies or implementation would solve. As has already been discussed in length, this is a one dimensional mentality that discredits the value of the social side of education. Digital learning should be a socio technical experience; one that is built on technology but carried forth by active social participation.
The fourth assumption is that only students, who are ‘digital natives’, have the capabilities to adapt to a digital learning environment while older adult educators cannot. This is one of the most incorrect assumptions, but it has a very wide reach in the public mindset. In reality, “students often fail to transfer digital competences available in their private lives to their learning environments” and that “no significant age-related differences in the use of digital technologies” (Kopp, 2019). Additionally, in the COVID learning environment, many teachers have become much more competent at a rapid rate. In a study this past summer, it was found through training workshops targeting specific digital skills technological literacy and competency can rapidly increase among professors regardless of background (Peisachovich et al., 2020). Digital natives are just a generational buzzword invented to drive home false narratives about generalized generational skill sets and differences. Discourses around millennials in higher education and the workplace have done unseen harm to the believability of an online classroom. The final assumption with digitalization is that it comes at too great a cost to go through with it. While this will be broken down further on in the report, it has to be said that this is a gross over exaggeration. The COVID situation has proved that the technologies are already almost all in place. Each one of these assumptions is almost entirely false but undermines the belief in the potential of digital transformation. Many people have also had these assumptions strengthened by their interpretations of remote learning’s failings during COVID.
On top of all of these assumptions, the inherent hierarchy of higher education institutions means that nearly everyone in the chain of command needs to be convinced in the quality for a change to be made (Kopp et al. 2019). Even at Lafayette College, a universal change in curriculum or teaching style couldn’t be put forth by a few professors alone. Thankfully, we have a small, tight knit community, where the hierarchical pyramid is not too tall to overcome. Lafayette’s small size provides the flexibility to change how to run the school semester to semester. This is something that larger colleges don’t have access to, as they would get bogged down from extraneous cases such as vastly different communities within each program. The small student to faculty ratio also makes it easier to account for everyone’s input when trying to push the learning experience in a better direction. If all the professors and students get on board and let their voice be heard, perhaps a change of attitude can occur within the Lafayette leadership. The College has provided access to many student resources in the past, such as counselling & advising, health services and access to a myriad of education databases. There is also a history of student and faculty led expansions to these resources and support networks. The funding and services just need to be redirected to properly serve our online community. Lafayette is the perfect organization for being a testbed of improvements to digital education. The politics of this matter should be quick to turn if the truth about what a digital education can be is made clear. Ultimately, in the current world situation, most people within education organizations only view the current remote learning situation as a temporary emergency stopgap. In doing this they continue to uphold the prior mentioned assumptions and do not fully commit to the changes required to make remote learning the best it can be. Attitudes of policymakers in higher education need to change before any successes can be realized, and a great starting point would be here at Lafayette.