Blended Learning Fallacy

One of the side effects of Covid is that blended learning has come to – and will stay at every college or university near you. ‘Blended’ meaning a combination of both onsite and online educational activities. Schools proudly present their online strategies. All kinds of workshops are offered to lecturers and professors to facilitate the transition. But despite all this, one element is missing: a clear explanation and motivation why it is necessary in the first place. Maybe because it is very difficult to formulate such a justification. Purely from an educational point of view there are no reasons to increase online lecturer to student interaction at the expense of face to face contact. Zero. Zip. Nada. Human interaction does not improve when it goes online. On the contrary. There always will be a loss in depth and quality. That applies to everyday social interaction and also to classes, lectures, group discussions, and (individual) coaching sessions. In online communication some element is always lost or diminished, whether it is staying focused, the possibility to truly engage and interact, the interpretation of non verbal communication or just the pleasure of it. It is therefore no surprise that all the trainings that are offered to make online education work are aimed at trying to fix these kind of aspects. Makes a lot of sense right?

That being said there still may be good reasons to transfer certain forms of interaction to online environments. But such reasons are more of a practical nature, for instance saving time and money on traveling to a place to meet. Shifting interaction to online forms then involves weighing the pros and cons. Making trade offs as economist call it. Yes, the quality of the interaction will be lower, but in specific cases not so much and so by not meeting face to face we can save time that can be used more productively elsewhere. But I haven’t seen or heard such trade offs being explicitly made either.

Of course students not only learn during the time they spend listening to – or interacting with a lecturer and other students, whether online or in real life. They also learn at home or elsewhere, possibly using online sources or tools. But using such online tools is an add on, not a replacement for real interaction between students and lecturers. And of course before the digital age we worked pretty much in that mode too, by reading and studying actual paper books (something that still is preferable in order to really understand anything) in addition to going to school. In that sense blended learning has been around for many centuries. 

Meanwhile students are becoming increasingly vocal in expressing their dissatisfaction with the lack of real life education and I support their cause. Of course everybody understands that in this Covid crisis, (partially) shifting education to online channels is a necessary surrogate. But in no way has it been made even remotely plausible that this necessity is still there in a post Covid world. The whole thing seems to be driven by technological ideology and bias rather than educational added value. And of course universities are so much more than providers of courses. They are places where mental growth and development is fostered with real life interaction at its very core. If universities don’t recognize this they will loose their raison d'êtreand jeopardize their own future.

 Ewoud Jansen