Time to Move Beyond the Hype of Remote Learning

It’s the time of year when nearly every media source publishes a “best of” or “worst of” list for the year just past. While 2020 was, in the words of one advertisement, “a lemon of a year,” 2021 is ending on a seriously down note as new COVID cases set records across much of the world. One list that caught our eye of the “most hyped” trends from Fast Company: NFT’s, the Metaverse, virtual reality, and remote/hybrid work are on the list.

While we question whether remote/hybrid work is over-hyped—this one seems to have legs that will go well beyond COVID—we would add online education to the list, especially in the younger grades. Exactly no parent uttered the words, “Wow, this remote learning is working really well for my first grader.” Instead, most parents were in a mad rush to get their children back in school anywhere they could. Putting aside the hitherto unacknowledged role that school plays in childcare for working parents, the importance of in-person education is clear from the field experience of 2020 and 2021.

However, we would caution against declaring the remote learning field dead; instead, the issue seems to be with pre-pandemic claims of its universality. The task for educators will be to figure out when and for which students remote learning works well. Online will play a massive role in the field’s future, just not one as all-encompassing as we might have once imagined.