COVID-19 has caused many of us to pause, to reroute our lives in a variety of ways. With this has come the challenge of reconfiguring how we should best approach our work and our research. The balancing act has been difficult, pushing many of us to our limits.

A few items of interest have come up recently that don’t merit an entire post, but are worth a quick review.

Almost half of all US public school students were full-time remote in January
Education Week reports that the first large-scale federal government survey shows, as of January:

• 43 percent of 4th graders were learning full time from home

• 48 percent of 8th graders were learning full time from home

• 75 percent of schools offered at least some in-person instruction

Another way to look at these data is that 25% of schools were offering only remote instruction, but 43-48% of students were learning remotely. Therefore, a non-trivial percentage of families were choosing full-time remote learning even when they had a full-time onsite or hybrid learning opportunity available.

Some recent blog posts have generated quite a bit of discussion by email, texts, and phone calls. I’m using this post to touch on some of those points of view. (Comments have been lightly edited to preserve anonymity and for clarity.)

On March 11, 2021, President Biden made good on a key promise if elected president - by signing the American Rescue Plan, a historic relief bill for the nation. As part of the new law, states and local education agencies (LEAs) are going to receive $122 billion dollars in federal funding for education. The bill is the largest relief bill to date, but there are also more parameters Congress put in place compared to the earlier stimulus laws. This bill requires at least 20% of funds must be used to address learning loss through evidence-based interventions that respond to students’ academic, social, and emotional needs. The remaining funds can be put towards any allowable use under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act; Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act; and Adult Education and Family Literacy Act. The Alliance for Excellent Education has a helpful breakdown here.

At Ohio Connections Academy (OCA), we have always been interested in providing field experiences for teacher candidates. We have had some interactions with colleges that were not comfortable with the idea of virtual teaching and learning. My team and I have encountered this bias from professors as we went through our own masters and doctoral programs.

This title (rock star teachers are a problem) may seem counterintuitive, if not flat-out crazy. Can great teachers really be a problem? Not for their students, of course. But I believe they can cause problems across school systems by creating unrealistic expectations regarding what teachers can and should do.

A recurring theme of DLC blog posts, and elsewhere, is that pandemic-induced remote learning typically uses different methods than online learning as practiced by experienced online schools and course providers. In particular, we have noted the extent to which synchronous video is frequently used during remote learning, while online schools and courses tend to rely primarily on asynchronous tools.

Our recent blog posts have looked at policy and practice developments from states and schools, and opinions from a variety of experts. Arguably, however, parents are as important as any other group in determining what changes will stick in education. With that in mind, we have been monitoring some recent opinion polls regarding what parents think about education during the pandemic. The data points and graphics in this post are from the National Parents Union, their polling, and their Twitter feed.

“Make schools more human by using technology” seems like either A) an oxymoron, or B) an example of the old saying that when all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In other words, of course the Digital Learning Collaborative would think that the way to make schools “more human” is by using more tech.

The 2021 legislative session began only a few weeks ago, but there has been a flurry of action taking place. It appears and feels like many legislatures are moving at full speed ahead in case of a COVID-19 outbreak that might force the session to stop for a time to get the virus under control. This means the pace of the year feels faster than normal.

Bill introductions are coming in fast, and predictably, have a large focus on education and education technology. This year has already brought forth several proposals with the goal of giving families more options and control over the education of their students.

Back in the summer, the New York Times ran an article whose title explained a key problem with the health care response to COVID-19:

Bottleneck for U.S. Coronavirus Response: The Fax Machine

Before public health officials can manage the pandemic, they must deal with a broken data system that sends incomplete results in formats they can’t easily use.

Opening paragraph:

Public health officials in Houston are struggling to keep up with one of the nation’s largest coronavirus outbreaks. They are desperate to trace cases and quarantine patients before they spread the virus to others. But first, they must negotiate with the office fax machine.

As we leave 2020 behind and transition to the new semester and new year, what’s the latest prognosis for developments in digital learning?

On December 27th, 2020 President Trump signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act (CAA). The package was essentially two bills in one: the stimulus package and appropriations for the next fiscal year. The total bill was $2.3 trillion dollars; $900 billion for stimulus relief and the remainder to keep the federal government in operation. Of the $900 billion Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (CRRSA) K-12 education will receive roughly $57 billion. The funds will be distributed largely in the same way as the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which was passed in March 2020. The majority of this fund ($54.3 billion) will be for public schools. The funds will again go to the Education Stabilization Fund (ESF), and state education agencies (SEAs) must distribute at least 90% of funds to local education agencies (LEAs). The language for SEA uses of the remaining 10% of the funds is very vague, stating that the money may be used to “respond to emergency needs as determined by the state agency.”

Among the challenges for the advocates for high quality digital learning throughout much of 2020 was distinguishing good practices from the emergency remote learning that was too often implemented poorly by schools, colleges, and universities.

Hint: Properly Designed Small-Group Instruction Can Meet Students’ Need for Interpersonal Support and Enhance Their Engagement in Online Learning

In addition to all the other challenges created by COVID-19, children and adolescents are suffering from widespread school closures, which has relegated students to learning at home in physical isolation from one another. A recent review of 63 studies involving 51,576 students found that the social distancing and isolation resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic was linked to higher levels of stress, fear, boredom, loneliness, anxiety, depression, and related mental health problems. This extended social isolation can have adverse effects on children’s long-term mental health, and negative effects can develop months or years after social isolation.

A recent blog post documented the increase in schools shifting back to remote learning as COVID-19 cases are surging. That post did not address whether these closures are justified given the evidence of how the disease spreads, mostly because we don’t have any expertise relative to that question. It’s worth noting, however, that we are seeing quite a bit of pushback against school closures just as more states and districts are reducing in-person learning.

COVID-19 cases are spiking, and schools are again shifting to remote learning—if they had gone back to onsite attendance. For many district leaders, it probably feels like Groundhog Day as they are revisiting so many of the issues that first arose last spring, and again in the early fall months.

With COVID-19 cases spiking in almost all states, many districts pulling back on instruction in physical schools, and promising vaccine news emerging, this seems like a good time to gaze into the virtual crystal ball and think about what the coming months will mean to our schools and students.

The last blog post reviewed several briefs from the American Institutes for Research that explored online credit recovery. The AIR study found that, overall, outcomes were about the same in the online and f2f credit recovery courses.

We’ve had this text on our Digital Learning Collaborative website for two years:

“Among the most common questions related to online, blended, and digital learning is "Does it work?" Usually the questioner means "Is it as good as or better than face-to-face instruction?"

There is no simple answer to this question, for a couple of reasons.

First, there are so many types of online, blended, and digital learning that no single answer can cover them all.

Second, comparisons of different school types or instructional models are notoriously difficult…

Third, many studies are very narrow, for example, looking at a single grade level or subject area, and the generalizability or transferability to other contexts is unclear or not methodologically sound.”