Stress Tests, Opportunities and Learning Design
Most people would be well aware of the Coronavirus (or more correctly CoVID-19) that is causing a great deal of angst and misery around the world. It is a serious issue, and governments, institutions, businesses and individuals need to carefully consider their response and put into practice their management plans (assuming that they have them). This is especially true in the Australian higher education sector, which provides education to a whole host of international students, some of whom have been affected by the CoVID-19 epidemic.
While the priority needs to be placed on the public health initiatives, I think there is an interesting examination to be done on institutional responses about this from the perspective of learning design. As it stands, at my university, there are significant numbers of students who are either still trapped in China, and unable to leave due to the travel bans, or perhaps quarantined on Christmas Island, or perhaps undertaking home-based quarantine. Regardless of their precise location, they are unable to attend face to face classes. In some cases, they might not be able to use the internet, or particular sites might be blocked by country specific laws. This raises some interesting questions about how best to respond to this. These questions are both of an ethical and also a practical nature.
Purely from a practical perspective, there is a learning design challenge that needs to be addressed. In this case, the questions hat needs to be answered is this: How can students continue to take part in their learning, even if they are unable to attend face to face classes? One possible answer is to delay the start of semester – which is something that some universities have flirted with. The problem with such an approach is that there is no real idea how long such a delay might be needed. For example, a university could delay the start of semester for 2 weeks – but what if the travel ban is still in place at the end of those two weeks? Further delay might lead to clashes with the rest of the calendars and other learning activities. Also, students who are capable of attending might be less than satisfied with the delay. Also, how is the lost time made up? Intensive classes will have implications for workload for academics and other staff.
Another possible answer lies in the use of educational technology to support these students while they remain off-site. Fortunately, most universities have some kind of LMS in place, even if the level of sophistication in their use is varied both within and across universities. These LMSs CAN (and it’s a big CAN) serve as the backbone for moving teaching and learning provision from mostly face to face or blended to entirely online – at least for the duration of the travel ban and quarantine. While that’s a solution, there is some difficult terrain that needs to be navigated before it is a satisfactory solution. Firstly, universities must find a way to navigate regional bans. For example, YouTube is banned in China. There are issues with using any Google products, including Google Classroom. Other tools may be slowed down, or even blocked entirely. So, even if academics can transfer their teaching and learning activities online, they need to also ensure that students in China can access the materials. Another practical situation is particularly pertinent in Schools of Education: a large number of courses require some element of practical experience. How is this going to be managed when students are not even in the country? Again, that’s a learning design consideration – albeit one that is tricky to solve. Finally, many of the teacher education subjects that are being affected emphasise collaboration and interactivity in the form of workshops and seminars, rather than the more traditional lectures and tutorials. This might be approximated through learning designs, but there’s a few nuances to navigate here, not least of which might be explaining to academics that you might be able to deliver the same learning outcomes through different learning activities.
There are also ethical issues to address, too. Principally amongst these are issues of equity – students have been disadvantaged through no fault of their own, so does the school have a responsibility to ensure that they can access their learning? If this was a matter fo a disability, the answer is straightforward. For a pandemic, it’s more complicated. And any solution inevitably leads to more issues: if, for example, it is possible to move parts of the course entirely online, should that have an effect on the onshore students, who might argue that they should be able to do it online too? Another issue to consider is the limited number of students affected. For example, if only two students are affected, does that mean there needs to be less effort put into developing a solution, than if there are 200 students affected?