I read that two renowned universities in the United States, Duke y New York University (NYU), pushed by the effects of the outbreak of the Covidien-19 coronavirus in China, which has already reached their country as well, have decided that students from the campuses that these universities have in Kunshan and Shanghai, respectively, do not go to class, transforming the face-to-face subjects until now, into online subjects. As the source of the news, Lindsay McKenzie, points out in the magazine Inside HigherEdThe decision was not easy, and had to be taken in haste, with the difficulties that this entails. As one NYU official stated: “the magnitude of the crisis has forced us to act together.”
Always because of a crisis. The history of distance education, before, and that of online education today, always shows us that it has progressed through critical situations. No matter how much experts in the field write, explain, advise and recommend developing online education models based on social, individual, learning and preparation benefits for a digitalized society, the major decisions that have brought forward the implementation of online education have always had their origins in extreme situations. The law of the last resort.
This was the case at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where the first and best multimedia materials for forensic training were developed. This university in the state of Maryland suffered from a severe shortage of cadavers for practice in its School of MedicineThe solution was to invest a large amount of money in developing a multimedia application that would allow students in their final years of the course to simulate autopsies. Not only was it a success, but the improvements introduced later have turned it into one of the best learning materials in digital environments.
In the city of Vancouver, Canada, traffic jams are a constant. The beautiful University of British Columbia (UBC) is located on an isthmus. The scenery is idyllic, but the fact that the entrance to the university is via a single street, which is the one that gives access to the isthmus, generated a lethal domino effect for the city. In the early morning, when all the students were heading to the university by different means of transport, the entire city was blocked. The solution was to stagger the entry of students into the university, and the way to do this was to transform subjects that were taught in the early morning into online subjects. In this way, the bottleneck that the university represented in the mornings was drastically reduced. UBC has been one of the pioneering and recognized universities in the offer of hybrid and online education for many years.
The same news item informs us that the transition has been made more quickly than these institutions could have anticipated and that the feedback they have received from students is satisfactory. They also add that teachers have felt comfortable, despite highlighting that 88% of their teaching staff had not had any relevant previous experience in teaching online.
In the future, we will probably hear that the results obtained were not quite as expected or, above all, that they were not at the same level as could have been expected if the classes had been held in person, as initially planned. What will be surprising, when these assessments are made, is that no one will remember this 88% of teachers who had neither experience nor, above all, training in the online teaching methodology. They will blame these hypothetical not-so-good results on the method used, as if the method itself were to blame for the fact that no one has bothered to put it into practice in the best possible way.
It is obvious that not everything can be solved by online education. It would be a shame if it had that responsibility on top of that. And not all so-called online education is the same or has the same value. There are various models of online education, some much more rigorous than others. As is the case with face-to-face education, of course.
When will we see online education from a truly proactive perspective that allows us to advance our educational systems and not just as reactive mechanisms to face reality?
