Among the themes surrounding remote learning during the pandemic is that Black students, along with other students of color, have been more impacted by disruptions to instruction than White students. As presented in numerous articles and policy reports starting in spring 2020, this view started with the evidence that Black and Latinx students were falling behind further than White students, increasing the achievement gap during extended periods of remote learning. More recently, such reports showed how the “higher a district’s share of white students, the more likely it is to offer in-person instruction.”

A previous blog post explored the enrollment increases we have been observing in online schools and courses. Increases in student attending online schools are often in the range of 40%, while state virtual schools have seen an uptick in course enrollments stretching from about 30% to 300%.

The key challenge of remote learning is that it’s remote.

I know what you’re thinking…”I paid for this insight?” (Editor’s note—blog subscriptions are free.)

Here’s the slightly longer version of this analysis:

The key challenge of remote learning is that it relies on education technology, and technology-related instructional strategies—but the large majority of ed tech has been devised for, and envisioned for, use in mainstream, age-graded, time-constrained schools and classrooms. The technology platforms and online content being used to deliver instruction at a distance have always represented a small niche of interest and demand.

Administrators and school leaders are confronting challenging, high-stakes decisions while planning to reopen their schools as COVID-19 continues on seemingly unabated. They are facing pressures from every side—whether it’s trying to reverse the COVID Slide (making up for lost learning), working through the myriad of obstacles in the path of safely opening school buildings, or fending off the political challenges of closing them.

The large majority of media reports treat remote learning during the pandemic as something new. In one sense, emergency remote learning as it is being implemented by mainstream school districts is new. All previous online learning—full schools or individual courses—was selected by students and teachers who chose to teach and learn online. The situation in spring 2020, with all teachers and students online (or not engaging at all), was unprecedented. In the current fall semester, a mix of online, onsite, and hybrid instruction exists. But many students and teachers are still selecting from limited choices.

People often ask me to name my favorite online teaching tool. My answer is always the same: Hands down, it’s online discussion forums.

As a veteran online teacher, I view discussion forums as the meat and potatoes of my online courses. They are where my teaching happens — where I interact with students, guide their learning, and get to know them as people. The joy I’ve come to find in online teaching stems directly from those interactions.

With the fall semester underway, it’s clear that online school enrollments have surged. Some examples are listed below. Numbers are year-over-year increases unless otherwise noted, and where no link is provided, we received the numbers in direct and unpublished communications from these schools.

The public school district shut down on March 12 in response to COVID-19. Responding the following day quickly, I synergized with the Instructional Technology Specialist to plan for distance learning. We gained access to a video conferencing tool and created online course skeletons for our elementary teachers. Although the elementary school teachers typically used Google more than the formal Learning Management System (LMS) adopted by the school district, to remain proactive, we created courses in that LMS with the belief the school district would mandate its use.

Most of our recent emails have been blog posts, primarily looking at what’s happening in schools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, among other topics.

Our blogging will continue. In addition, in mid-September we are going to announce some changes to the Digital Learning Collaborative, in particular regarding new opportunities for schools, districts, and others to become more deeply involved in the DLC. We’re still working out the final details, so consider this a preview of new options.

COVID-19 presents myriad threats to education, educators, students, and parents: the immediate risk related to health and safety, the possibility of major cuts to budgets as state revenues decline, the loss of learning…the list goes on.

(This post uses the term “remote learning” to describe distance learning being implemented as a response to school closures, and “online learning” to describe the practices of schools and programs that were online prior to the pandemic.)

Real-time vs asynchronous instruction is one of the key distinctions involved in the shift to remote learning, for at least two reasons.

Curriculum development, classroom management, relationship building, performance data monitoring—over the past hundred years or so, the job duties of a K-12 teacher have gone by different names and have been accomplished different ways, but the basic necessities of a teacher’s job have stayed largely the same. Picture an early 20th century one-room schoolhouse with a teacher standing at the front of the room next to a chalkboard, or picture a classroom today with a teacher standing at the front of the room next to a smartboard. In 1919 or 2019, learning happens within those walls, within those minutes of the day. Given all that’s stayed the same over so long, Fall 2020 may mark the largest and most sudden shift to the responsibilities of a teacher in the U.S. in modern history.

Prior to the COVID-19 global pandemic, online course taking had become widespread in K–12 and postsecondary education across the U.S. Then last spring, most schools and districts across the nation suddenly transitioned to various forms of remote learning to continue serving students during COVID-19. Now as uncertainty about in-person schooling continues this fall, it is anticipated that the use of online courses will expand.

The last post ended with this text:

Even as these discussions [about school reopenings] are occurring, new information continues to emerge. In particular, three related ideas may point to a new direction…These ideas are:

1. Remote learning has been, and will likely to continue to be, much harder for the youngest students than for older students.

2. Young children seem to be showing less propensity to spread COVID-19 than older students.

3. For comprehensive K-12 districts (leaving aside districts which are just elementary or just high school), a step towards a solution for instruction in the coming school year may be to treat elementary schools and high schools differently, perhaps very differently.

With less than a month before many schools are scheduled to start for the fall, the pace of activity has become fast and furious. Every day brings news of another set of districts that have decided to open onsite, remotely, or with some combination of the two. But this activity is occurring against a backdrop of political sound and fury that is obscuring nuanced discussion, and making progress towards solutions even more difficult than it should be.

With an on-going global pandemic and civil unrest, social-emotional learning is a necessity in today’s classrooms – whether online or brick and mortar. Undoubtedly, students’ social-emotional wellbeing goes hand in hand with their academic success, but in practice, it’s rarely that simple. To better understand SEL in online and blended settings, we asked teachers from across the country what challenges they faced supporting their students’ social and emotional development online. Here’s what we learned from the 100 teachers who responded:

Over the last ten years or so there has been a quiet debate about the relative merits of using state virtual schools, versus course choice programs, among states that wish to promote supplemental online learning course availability for students in mainstream districts. The pandemic may be providing an additional data point in this debate—although it’s still early.

Although it’s not gotten any easier to predict what will happen broadly with schools in the fall, every day my Google news feed carries more than one story of a district announcing a hybrid plan for school year 2020-21.

As summer progresses and the COVID-19 situation gets more confounding—with cases in the U.S. near their high but deaths sharply down—predicting what schools will do in the fall, or what they should do, is not getting any easier.

With nearly all U.S. school buildings closed for the last part of the school year, teachers and leaders scrambled to support remote learning and respond to the emerging needs of 57 million elementary and secondary students. Now in early summer and with the school year over in most districts, it’s time to begin planning for next academic year.