It is the worst—and the best—of times!

For many of us with affection for the machinery of conventional campus-based education, this is the worst of times. From Melbourne to Manchester, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused the disruption of entire education ecosystems. Economies and businesses that have thrived on the education industry are in turmoil, and many may never recover. Vanguards of the campus-based learning experience from Cambridge to Yale, which have thrived on their age-old traditions and reputations of small-group teaching and the campus-based experience, announced that they are locking up and taking their learning and teaching operations online. As a result, almost overnight, students have had to get used to learning online, and their parents have had to become tutors, while they themselves worked from home.

For proponents of open, flexible, and distance education, however, this is the best of times. After decades of existence on the peripheries of conventional campus-based educational practices, distance education is suddenly thrust onto the center. In one clean sweep, senior management has decided that they are going fully online in order to be able to remain viable. All those questions and criticisms about the veracity of distance education, and if it is as effective and efficient as the conventional classroom-based face-to-face educational experience, do not matter anymore. Distance education is no longer learning at the backdoor (see Wedemeyer, 1981). It is about learning through the front door.

The irony is that it has taken a calamity for us to rethink and reengineer our approaches to learning and teaching, despite evidence in favor of the need to do so, long before COVID-19 struck. Furthermore, our current response leaves a lot to be desired, because instead of looking at the science and what works, we are looking for quick fixes and short-term solutions for what are long-term issues. One such response is the hasty adoption of emergency remote teaching—a concept which is about packaging what works on campus and piping it down the tube without much attention to its redesign for new media. While this might seem to be the easiest thing to do for the moment, it is rather like using a square peg to plug a round hole. It will simply not do, and leaves much to be desired. Moreover, attempting to defend it and describe why and how emergency remote teaching differs from more robust forms of online distance learning is even worse (Hodges et al., 2020). The suggestion that this form of emergency remote teaching is a short-term solution and will cease to exist when we have passed the current pandemic, is even more ludicrous. Even if, and when, this pandemic were to pass, we ought not to be returning to where we were pre-COVID-19. That would mean we will have learned nothing from this experience and are not any better prepared for the next pandemic or disruption.

While I accept the witticism that if something is worth doing, then it is worth doing poorly (see Daniel, 2020), an ill-conceived solution can do more harm than good for the long term. We have at our disposal all the help we need about what works and how we should start to rethink and reengineer our education systems now and for the future (see O’Neil, 2008; Tamim et al., 2011). A hasty response such as that which is captured by the notion of emergency remote teaching runs the risk of doing more harm than good to open, flexible, and distance education, and education more generally, as rightly pointed out by Jon Baggaley in his reflection “Educational Distancing” in this issue. Baggaley warns that if and when things do not go so well for students, teachers, or the parents, many will be quick to blame the failure of online distance education methods as a form of viable educational practice, and less so on poor strategizing by senior management and educational organizations. This would be undermining decades of work and experience with what works, and how it works, both pedagogically and technologically.

The use of videos for carrying and presenting educational content is a case in point. It is baffling to see the widespread adoption of video as a savior during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Curtis Bonk points out in his reflection “Pandemic Ponderings, 30 Years Today: Synchronous Signals, Saviors, or Survivors?”, the use of video for carrying and presenting educational content, both synchronously and asynchronously, is not new. We have plenty of experience with the use of this technology that we can draw from. Now is not the time to panic but to learn from this vast experience with the educational use of video. The parallels between what is facing higher education and humanity more broadly could not be clearer. This is the time to listen to the science, as there is plenty of it out there. We do not need to record hour-long lectures and broadcast them down the tube in real or delayed time. We know how to do this better. What we need to be doing now is rethinking and reimagining conventional educational processes, and not simply pouring old wine in different containers. This includes the assessment of learning outcomes as suggested in Hannah Knott’s timely review of Conrad and Openo’s book Assessment Strategies for Online Learning: Engagement and Authenticity.

Video is a powerful tool, but poor use of it runs the risk of alienating both the teachers and the learners from making optimum use of it. Two articles in this issue of the journal address the use of video in learning and teaching. The first is the article by Ana-Paula Correia, Chenxi Liu, and Fan Xu “Evaluating Videoconferencing Systems for the Quality of the Educational Experience”. This study examined four widely used tools that support videoconferencing, namely Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams, and WhatsApp. Instead of falling into the trap of endorsing one over the other, this study examined their attributes against a framework for promoting experiential e-learning. These attributes include their general characteristics, learning-related features, and usability. And therein lies the strength of this article as it points out to the vendors and developers what the educators are looking for in these technologies, and not how educators can make use of what these technologies are able to do. These developments include better security, more intuitive and user-friendly interfaces, and their integration with related and commonly used technologies. The second article on this topic is “Understanding Vicarious Participation in Online Language Learning” by Christine Pleines. While the use of lecture capture and its use retrospectively is quite widespread in the sector, the recording of live tutorials and its use retrospectively is not as common. This study explored the use of video to record live small-group tutorials and making these recordings available to students who do not have access to such contiguous learning arrangements. It found that, while the cognitive benefits of learning vicariously are not large, the innovative use of the video tool in this manner has the potential to influence learning achievement, and more importantly, provide online language learners a more authentic and deeper educational experience that would be possible with it.

The COVID-19 pandemic has also brought home the realization that schools are not merely places for learning, as parents and children grapple with learning and working from home. At the lower levels, schools serve several other functions as well, so that parents are able to take up paid employment and contribute to the workforce and the economy. Schools play an important role in the socialization and the nurturing of young minds. Most of the parents are ill equipped to provide many of these functions at home, as we are finding out during COVID-19. In addition, where parents do have the time and the capacity to devote to the tuition of their children, many homes will not have access to the required facilities and equipment, including private study spaces. Seen in this way, schooling is not unlike the communal supply of electricity or drinking water. It is far more efficient and effective to pool these resources for the benefit of all, as opposed to each one having their own supply (Carr, 2009). Organized schooling is much like that—a complex cognitive as well as a social process that requires a great deal of agency and fortitude on the part of everyone involved—and should be retained.

Two articles in this issue offer insights on both of these processes. The first article is about self-efficacy by Chia-Lin Tsai, Moon-Heum Cho, Rose Marra, and Demei Shen. Self-efficacy is about confidence in our own abilities to undertake or execute a course of action. Based on that assumption, it would be fair to assume that the higher our confidence in our own capacity, the more likely we are to succeed. It would be also fair to assume that self-efficacy would be particularly important in educational settings with minimal structure and guidance; hence, the need to understand self-efficacy so that it can be ascertained reliably, and that knowledge used to design appropriate and suitable learning and teaching transactions. The article by Chia-Lin Tsai and her collaborators present a report on the validation of one such instrument—the Self-Efficacy Questionnaire for Online Learning. It is arguable that self-efficacy is a product of both; one’s own aptitude, as well as the influence of the social group. The article “Social Presence and Online Discussions: A Mixed Method Investigation” by Patrick Lowenthal and Joanna Dunlap explores the role of this latter variable. It suggests that like cognitive presence, social presence is also a complex phenomenon, more complicated than thought earlier. Factors that influence social presence include the size of the learning group, previous relationships among group members, the educational context, and, very importantly, the social context, which includes both the home and the broader society.

Individuals within a social setting will react and respond differently to a whole range of situational variables. As such, one size will not fit all—a point that is underscored by the following two articles in the issue. First up is the article by Ibrahim Mutambik, John Lee, and Abdullah Almuqrin, “Role of Gender and Social Context in Readiness for E-learning in Saudi Schools”. This article takes a close look at how gender interacts with culture and context in students’ readiness for e-learning. It demonstrates that there are clear differences between genders, and that while this finding needs to be interpreted carefully, it suggests that there is an interaction between gender and the cultural context. Students should not be treated as individuals isolated from the social context within which they live. The social context influences the self-efficacy of students in a variety of ways, and this needs to be considered very carefully in the design of learning experiences. The second article, by Philippa Waterhouse, Rajvinder Samra, and Mathijs Lucassen, examines the relationships between work and family roles, and mental distress among distance education students—quite a noticeable phenomenon during the COVID-19 crisis. Their study suggests an association between family roles and responsibilities, work-study conflict, family-study conflict, and levels of reported mental distress. The article by Kate Jones, Phyllis Raynor, and Vera Polyakova-Norwood “Faculty Caring Behaviors in Online Nursing Education: An Integrative Review” suggests how the concept of care—a concept which is endemic to nursing and medical education—can be used to nurture both cognitive and social presence.

All of this is good advice, and there is a lot more where that comes from. And as suggested by George Veletsianos in his reflection “How Should We Respond to the Life-Altering Crises that Education is Facing?”, the best thing to do for now is to consider this advice carefully and begin to design educational experiences for the future, and not only for the current crisis that is facing the sector. This is not the time to despair and hope that this will pass and we can go back to life as it was prior to the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic is a product of human activity. We have seen it before, and it is very likely to appear again. We know how to teach well regardless of the circumstances. Now is the time to pay attention to this experience and advice and start to take small steps toward a rethink and redesign of schooling, so that we are better prepared, not just for the next pandemic, but also for the future!

Acknowledgments

The opening remarks of this editorial have been inspired by the immortal words of Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities.