Addressing the challenging elements of distance education

COVID-19 has had a profound impact on distance education and online learning practice in the last few years, and after the initial “emergency remote teaching” responses (Hodges et al., 2020), it is now time to reflect on what we have learned from this experience. In this special issue, we set out to explore some of the challenges of online distance education. Specifically, we wanted to explore the areas of distance education that appear to be the most difficult and that are traditionally dismissed by many educators as impossible to undertake for online learners. As editors with varied experiences of online learning design, we have encountered negative attitudes toward online education. We recognize that it is often seen as a lesser form of higher education (Anderson, 2011) and a poor substitute for face-to-face learning (Almasees et al., 2021; Cellini, 2021). However, as Bates (2023) noted, online elements are often not specifically designed for an online learning context, which results in just a poor version of a face-to-face experience.

We know there are higher education practitioners exploring novel and innovative ways to enable online learners to achieve an equitable learning experience with those who physically attend university. We also know, from our experience during the COVID-19 pivot to online, that the higher education sector is capable of adapting to new ways of learning and teaching at short notice, and that we are able to engage our learners with inventive, authentic learning experiences online. Over the last few years, educators have had the opportunity to rethink, reassess, and remodel pedagogical practices (Rapanta et al., 2021) and they have had to address difficult requirements in areas such as internships, placements, experiential learning, experiments without access to labs, and hands-on learning.

Now, as higher education enters a post-pandemic era, characterized by some pre-pandemic practices and thankfully also some changed practices and lessons learned. We were curious about the extent to which adapted practices for those challenging elements would continue to be offered to students, and indeed further evolve. In other words, will inventive and innovative practitioners lead us to new ways of engaging with our students? Can these new and novel approaches afford opportunities for a more inclusive future of digitally engaged and flexible education? Or do many practitioners and senior leaders consider the risk not worth the reward, with the message that we should return to how we have always managed these challenging elements, that is, in a face-to-face context? In short, what lessons have we learned?

For this special issue, we invited submissions from all disciplines and domains to understand how innovative learning and teaching strategies, learning design approaches, and the uses of technology might enable students to fulfill authentic learning requirements and the challenging aspects of higher education in fully online modes. The response to our call was somewhat overwhelming, with abstracts submitted by practitioners from all over the world, confirming to us that there are many stories to share, both successful and less so, about new and reimagined approaches that inform innovative teaching and learning practice. There were far more ideas and cases than we could fit into this issue, so we have carefully selected the articles that serve as insightful examples and critical reflections of practice. They are also a reminder that the genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and returning to pre-COVID-19 practice will not make the most of what we have learned, nor offer the flexibility that is required for the future. This special issue provides both a glimpse into that future and a range of ideas on how to approach some of the challenges of designing for distance education.

We begin our journey with a look at hands-on education, a type of practice that is often cited as the most difficult to achieve at a distance. In their paper, Katie Burke, William Baker, and Glenda Hobdell agree that an inability to supervise hands-on practice is a real challenge for areas such as the creative arts. They share their experience and concerns as Australian initial teacher educators, aiming to prepare primary school teachers adequately for the classroom through online education. In exploring solutions, they consciously designed constructively aligned, hands-on learning that connects activity and theory through assessment, theorizing this as a praxis-focused pedagogy. Building on demonstrated links between an educator’s arts confidence and their teaching proficiency, they set out to build student confidence in practical experiences through critical reflection, which resulted in a marked improvement of their students’ perceptions of confidence and classroom readiness. They found that their purposeful design of learning activities also improved engagement, student enjoyment of learning, and a positive change to students’ perceptions of the value of arts in education. Their positive outcomes should prove a useful springboard for anyone considering how to design effective hands-on or practice-based education, and they clearly demonstrate that purposefully designed online education can be successful despite perceived challenges.

Authentic and experiential approaches to learning are practical approaches that are highly valued in higher education. Research shows that students learn more effectively and are more socially responsible when actively engaged in their learning (Gavillet, 2018). So, what happens when undergraduate students, who would normally undertake live event projects as part of their course, transition to become online students due to COVID-19 lockdowns? What then happens if they need to engage with an industry that almost came to a stop during this period too? In their article, Kathryn Goldie, Rachel Ironside, and Elliot Pirie share their experiences of adapting event management education for a new era. They consider their experience of designing online collaborative approaches to experiential learning and the challenge of ongoing change, such as the impact on students of moving from live events to virtual events and back again. They share feedback from students regarding the positive and negative impacts of adapting to change, of navigating online group dynamics, and of developing resilience. The authors conclude that although the changes were very challenging, a positive outcome was a growth in confidence for learners. They observe that their students gained capability with regard to motivation, communication, time management, and digital skills. The inherent value of online experiential learning is this wider set of skills. They conclude that, as practitioners, it is important that we communicate this added value to students and help them to understand how these skills support their personal and professional development.

Internships can be seen as another form of experiential learning, and Qian Wang, Jiyao Xun, Na Li, Henk Huijser, Juming Chen, and Jian Chen report on a study that investigated how student effort and course design influenced online internships at a particular higher education institution in China. They followed a cohort of 95 postgraduate students who became distance learners in a credit-bearing internship course due to COVID-19. An action learning framework was applied to prompt student online collaboration and group inquiry. Interestingly, the framework relies to some extent on self-directed and self-reliant learners in virtual internships. Wang et al. analyzed and reflected on the importance and role of self-directed learning with technology in the context of a multidimensional community of inquiry in a virtual environment. The study further used students’ narratives to reflect on how self-directed learning, aided by technology, operated in practice, with a particular focus on three elements of virtual communities of inquiry: social, cognitive, and teaching. Their findings show how virtual internships can be facilitated through a community of inquiry model, despite a number of challenges. Their paper presents a model for educators and practitioners with which to develop student-staff partnerships in transforming internships from face-to-face to distance mode.

The wicked problem of how to enable effective internship opportunities for students remains a challenge for university educators, but even more so when those students learn at a distance and are from underrepresented groups. Kirsten Reid, Diane Butler, Catherine Comfort, and Andrew Potter stay with the theme of internships, and report on a pilot study conducted at the United Kingdom Open University, which examined the effectiveness of providing university-based internship opportunities for underrepresented student groups across two faculties. Gathering data through intern focus groups and supervisor interviews, this qualitative research demonstrates that virtual internships can be successful for both interns and supervisors. They share that, by providing flexible and supportive opportunities, they helped interns to develop transferable employability skills and build confidence in themselves. This example of engaging in virtual internships gives insight on how we can design education to foster critical skills.

Similar to internships, clinical placements offer real-world experiences and are a critical component of medical and health-related degrees. For clinical practice, placements afford opportunities to enable students to apply theory to practice and demonstrate their learning by working with live patients in healthcare facilities, under the supervision of clinical educators. Faced with the challenge of COVID-19 lockdowns and the pivot to online learning, Andrea Whitehead, Kelly Beak, Trevor Russell, and Megan Ross report on the implementation of a telehealth remote supervision model, where videoconferencing technology was used to connect geographically remote students, clinical educators, and patients to enable continuity of clinical placements for occupational therapy and speech pathology. This was a considerable challenge, as the use of telehealth supervision of students on clinical placements did not really happen prior to the pandemic. This qualitative study, involving both student and clinical educator focus groups, confirms that this model was a success and effective in developing students’ professional competencies and meeting their clinical placement requirements. Telehealth is a growing area of importance in healthcare, and the authors consider the importance of aligning experience with practice. They find that developing good supervisory relationships is critical to success and consider how feedback plays a pivotal role in this relationship, giving insights to some of the challenges. They conclude that a mix of remote and on-site supervision is an ideal way forward and share some practical considerations for implementing remote supervision in medical or allied health disciplines. Thus, they demonstrate that in the post-pandemic era, telehealth placements can be a viable option and expand the range of placement opportunities for students and institutions alike.

Although Whitehead et al. focused on the supervisory relationship in remote placements, it appears that in the lab environment, peer collaboration is a key element in remote supervision, which is the focus of Hengtao Tang, Miao Dai, Xu Du, Jui-Long Hung, and Hao Li’s paper. Laboratory experience, they suggest, is critical to foster college students’ collaborative problem-solving (CPS) abilities but identifying whether students stay cognitively engaged in CPS tasks during online laboratory sessions has rarely been addressed. Tang et al.’s study therefore applied a multimodal data analysis to examine college students’ (N = 36) cognitive engagement in CPS during their online experimentation experience. Groups of three collaborated on CPS tasks via shared worksheets and computer-based simulations in videoconferences. The study used portable electroencephalogram instruments to determine students’ levels of cognitive engagement in CPS activities. The results showed a significant difference in students’ cognitive engagement between different phases of CPS, with important identified links between cognitive engagement and self-efficacy.

Diane Hockridge and Matt Bower share their thoughts on whether professional education goals to develop competencies, skills, and capacities relevant for the professions are possible as a fully online student. They focus on theological education and note that the regular strategies to cultivate and support holistic personal development are normally met exclusively in face-to-face environments, by internship, authentic learning experiences, and spiritual formation programs. In their study, they explore students' perceptions of studying theology via asynchronous online learning to consider how it contributed to the students’ holistic formation. The additional challenge was thus the asynchronous nature of the online context, where holistic whole-person development is usually associated with an iterative (and synchronous) process in face-to-face contexts. Perhaps surprisingly, however, students were overwhelmingly positive that the asynchronous learning activities had contributed to their overall development. The authors attribute this to the fact that the learning activities were purposefully designed using the activity-centered analysis and design framework (Goodyear et al., 2021), peer interaction, and informal communities. Although developing an informal network of support may be specific to the students on this particular program, it becomes clear in Hockridge and Bower’s paper that purposeful learning design for an online learning context can enable inclusive learning and whole-person development. Although set in the disciplinary context of theology, the insights from this study are potentially applicable to many other disciplines that seek to facilitate the holistic formation of students, such as psychology, social work, or teaching.

One enduring challenge for online education is ensuring inclusion. Accessible technology and access to technologies are critical issues that emerged from the pivot to online during COVID-19, which have the potential to reinforce the digital divide. The development of inclusive online learning environments remains a challenge for educators worldwide, and indeed, a recent issue of the Distance Education journal, edited by Mary Rice and Michael Dunn (2022), was dedicated to inclusion in online environments, reinforcing its importance. In their paper in this special issue, Radek Vorlíček, Leona Stašová, Michel Hogenes, Eva Janebová, and Zuzana Průchová share their experience of evaluating teacher and student perceptions of inclusivity, focusing on the equity of both access and of educational safety. They found that the pivot was so rapid that it did not allow educators to learn to teach online. Educators also suffered the impact of disrupted home lives, with no time for redesign or to develop new capabilities. This created issues with the quality of design and problems related to inclusive practices, as the two are often related. Students reported that they felt there were issues with equitable access and inclusion and they further raised the issue of safety and bullying in online classrooms. The authors conclude that universities must focus on teacher education to ensure that our educators are capable of engaging with students equitably, and of managing online learning environments, and that they are prepared to design for more hybrid approaches that guarantee inclusivity.

Dianne Forbes, Dilani Gedera, Cheryl Brown, Maggie Hartnett, and Ashwini Datt evaluate online learning strategies that were put in place for practical learning across teacher education, health and medicine during the COVID-19 lockdowns. They share some of the alternatives that were employed, including in-home or community-based activities, virtual simulations, online practice, and video-based learning. They found that online learning for practical challenges is no less real for students than learning on campus, yet it was more instinctive for educators to remove the option or postpone it during the pivot to online, ultimately causing students to disengage from the only alternative in the form of “death by Zoom” lectures (Brown, 2020). One of the interesting aspects to emerge from this study is the recognition of students’ self-efficacy as an element of success. The authors share insights regarding student self-organization, with examples including arranging to access equipment to engage in hands-on practice, seeking opportunities for authentic experiences, and sharing video demonstrations with peers for feedback. The authors conclude that fostering self-efficacy and adaptability are critical skills for students, and educators need to recognize that hybrid approaches are more aligned with real-world practice than single physical locations.

Finally, Harriet Dunbar-Morris, Chrissi Nerantzi, Melita Sidiropoulou, and Lucy Sharp remind us that returning to a pre-pandemic modus operandi is neither possible nor advisable, despite some calls to do so (Naidu, 2023). They continue an exploration of the theme of self-efficacy and remind us of the value of quality learning design to enable students to move between teacher-led learning and independent learning. They call for educators to prioritize scaffolded learning design to enable independent learning and to focus on facilitator support, choice and flexibility, and activities that foster interaction, connection, and community. The authors share strategies for the design of online authentic, collaborative, and inquiry-based learning. They prioritize the student voice in the design of learning and encourage educators to engage in co-creation and collaboration with students (including online students). In this final paper for our special issue, the authors encourage us all to move away from the dichotomy of online and face-to-face learning and to see the design of learning as a place to enable students to become self-directed and self-regulated independent learners.

In this special issue, we have explored some successful and more challenging approaches, methods, and technologies that addressed the elements of learning that are normally considered too difficult to do online. We have heard that practitioners sometimes prefer to postpone or remove learning activities rather than redesign them for online environments. We have also seen how virtual placements, internships, and experiential learning cultivate motivation and promote independent learning. We have further explored how enabling praxis in learning and teaching fosters confidence and self-efficacy for learners. The common threads that are woven through this issue focus on the value of developing self-efficacy in our learners and how that in turn enables them to embrace an independent approach to learning, if supervised and appropriately scaffolded. We therefore conclude, with the authors in this special issue, that scaffolded learning design which fosters student agency is a powerful tool in addressing the challenging areas of online education. Purposeful learning design for online activities motivates student engagement, fosters learner agency, and develops critical skills in communication, collaboration, and digital capability, all of which are essential for a rapidly changing world. As has been highlighted in COVID-19 literature, for many occupations, remote working has become an entrenched workplace practice, which makes it critical that students engage with activities that build confidence, independent learning, and skills for new and evolving ways of working. Finally, we leave you with a key thread from our special issue: the importance of providing supportive learning structures and improving our educators’ ability to develop purposefully designed online learning to develop self-directed lifelong learners, regardless of how challenging that may be.