The Case for Continuity
I was a senior in highschool in the late '90s when I gave birth to my son. Adults in my Catholic high school questioned whether or not I could continue my education from a distance, and, quite frankly, whether they felt I deserved the opportunity. Those questions still haunt me today. In the end, my teachers prepared work packets for me and every day for three weeks between Halloween and Thanksgiving, as I acclimated to young motherhood, I labored over math problems in an antiquated textbook and typed essays on my Brother word processor. I kept pace with the daily curriculum during and after my absence and graduated high school with my peers.
As I look back on these experiences, it is clear to me it did not have to be that way. If my school had only been humanized in a manner that permitted me access to flexible, asynchronous learning, I would have been spared a significant amount of shame and anxiety from not being there in person. Those like me—young moms; students with chronic illness; youth who have experienced trauma; incarcerated, displaced, and homeless teens—understand that learning continuity is not a new challenge in education; but widespread school closures have suddenly made it an urgent one for the mainstream population.
The education landscape has evolved since the '90s, and blended and virtual classrooms are certainly more common than when I attended high school, but the COVID-19 pandemic catapulted brick and mortar classrooms into the cloud faster than anything we had experienced before. To manage this rapid shift, state education departments required districts to submit Continuity of Learning Plansthat outlined how they would transition their students from in-person to remote instruction with minimal disruption to learning. These plans mandated that district leaders address equity and access issues exacerbated by the pandemic. In response, administrators rethought everything from meal distribution to internet access in a matter of a couple weeks. Nevertheless, inequities abound.
At the same time school administrators scrambled to implement an emergency online learning program, they battled virtual learning’s stigmatized legacy. Traditionally, educators and stakeholders have not wholeheartedly embraced virtual learning, pointing to low course completion rates and lack of compelling student performance data as indicators of its ineffectiveness. Furthermore, online learning has been stigmatized in the eyes of those who see it as a last resort for “nonconforming” or “alternative” students. It is true that virtual high schools disproportionately provide credit recovery solutions for students at risk of not graduating on time; it is also true they offer second chances for students no longer welcome at their home districts.To add to this skepticism of online learning, the mass closures prompted a heavy dose of nostalgia. Parents, students, and educators now refer to school using evaluative binaries—pre- versus post-pandemic school, online versus in-person learning—but the reality is that technology in education is an ever-evolving ecology, and we are on a change continuum. Neil Postman (1992) in his anti-technology manifesto, Technopoly, described this continuum best:
Technological change is neither additive [n]or subtractive. It is ecological. I mean ecological in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environ-ment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have recon-stituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. (p. 18)
Despite his polemical opposition to educational technology, Postman’s caterpillar metaphor ironically serves an important point about the nature of virtual learning: When we introduce distance learning—at scale—to mainstream education, we reconstitute the conditions for student achievement. Of course, the necessity for a coordinated distance learning pedagogy that is available to all students predated and will postdate this crisis. But now, as leaders plan for students to return to school this fall, they must honor what virtual learning environments can do to reach all students. They must embrace the many ways that virtual school environments reflect and affirm our students’ realities outside of the physical school building. An important and overdue step in that process: implementing a district-wide learning management system (LMS).
The LMS as a Third Teacher
Loris Maluguzzi, founder of the Reggio Emilia approach to education referred to a child’s environment as the “third teacher. ” Reggio Emilia ambassadors believe the environment shapes and is shaped by the learning process, creating a “constant dialogue between architecture and pedagogy” (Reggio Emilia Approach, 2020). In our present learning ecosystem, the architecture of school has changed. Classroom walls are permeable, school is amorphous. In this version of school, the LMS functions like a classroom environment, a third teacher. LMSs are software applications used to deliver educational programming, but like a good teacher, an effective LMS is inclusive, supportive, responsive, rich with resources, and able to foster connections within and across communities. Unfortunately, the abrupt shift to remote teaching outpaced many districts’ readiness and capacity to implement a coordinated web-based or remote infrastructure; for districts who were not already using an LMS, the transition to online learning was especially disjointed and difficult.
Lessons Learned from the Pandemic
Michigan Virtual, a nonprofit organization that provides online courses and professional development for educators, in partnership with design firm Sundberg-Ferar, conducted a qualitative study on the effects of the pandemic on educational leaders, teachers, parents, and students. They found across the board that districts with an LMS in place were relieved they had one, and those who did not have one were frustrated (Byron, 2020). One English teacher said this:
I can’t imagine how I’d tackle online learning without our LMS. I use it and the tools within it to give students information, videos, docs, models, etc. We use Zoom and Meet for online meetings. It is effective because my students know how to do it. I didn’t need to train them much. I also put up plenty of mentor texts and videos of my lessons and my own modeling, so that helps them.
The schools that lacked an LMS specifically discussed their districts’ inability to communicate effectively. An administrator shared her frustration:
The biggest challenge has been to have a central place to go for all communication. Not e-mail, not a Classroom stream. Messages get lost in those formats. We need to have a bulletin board/dashboard that all people expect to go to. This is true for parents, for students, for staff to get questions answered. (Different boards for different audiences.) We need to have an infrastructure for learning so that everyone knows where to find the resources they will use most. Students need to have a place to keep work that is in progress, and students and parents and teachers all need to be clear on what the priorities are and what work needs to be turned in.
In other words, remote instruction during the pandemic taught schools the importance of a universal, coordinated platform with common social and communication norms to facilitate the flow of information between all stakeholders. The lack of a district-wide LMS caused a hyper-decentralization of school: multiple sign-ins for students and parents, slews of applications to navigate, confusion on where to go for information, too few or too many places to store and share documents, the list goes on. An LMS can mitigate a significant number of those frustrations.
Selecting the Right LMS
Having an LMS in place is not a substitute for a compelling vision for teaching and learning; it is the vehicle to help districts achieve that vision. Like any effective initiative, implementing an LMS into your school district will require careful and long-term planning as well as dedicated resources and thoughtful and ongoing professional development for all users. Michigan educational leaders developed a guide to assist districts in choosing the best-fit LMS that aligns to their school’s mission (“Guide to selecting,” 2020). The guide outlines a comprehensive selection process; to summarize the essence of the selection process, consider these four questions on the role that your LMS will play on the future of learning:
• Does the LMS facilitate student-driven learning?
• Does the LMS integrate with other tools and applications sostudents can work, learn, and collaborate seamlessly?
• Can the LMS be altered in scope and functionality so that itgrows over time with our district?
• Does the district have the commitment, time, and resourcesit will take to effectively implement the system across all usergroups—students, teachers, administrators, and parents?
Answering these questions can assist with choosing an LMS that fosters learning continuity; continuity that empowers students to work synchronously and asynchronously, to collaborate, to communicate, and to feel connected to the school community and culture.
The LMS as Social Connector
In addition to leveraging the LMS as a common learning platform, it will be important to leverage it as a way to keep students socially connected as they move from face-to-face to online classrooms. The new reality of school will include in-person, hybrid, and 100% virtual experiences—and students will flow between these models. David Jakes, educational design thinker, wrote about the concept of using the LMS to create a “virtual third place,” a place for students to socialize with other students that is not exclusively an academic space, or exclusively a social space, but something in between (Jakes, 2020). This concept is another illustration of the way that technology is neither additive, nor subtractive, but transformative. Previously, students relied on school as a place to stay connected with their peers. But now that face time with their peers at school will be reduced and fragmented with longer periods of virtual time in between, they will need a school-sponsored social application to satisfy these gaps. The LMS is one way to address the need for a virtual school-social space.
The LMS and the Future of Learning
The history of distance learning is storied and complex. Its legacy is wrought with bias against disenfranchised learners. It has been misappropriated in a way that alienates students from their learning communities. Distance learning, however, can also be extremely redemptive. Students who otherwise would not have been able to complete school have earned their diplomas and degrees. Students against difficult odds—COVID-19 being one of them—have persisted and succeeded. The LMS plays a critical role in supporting learning continuity for all students. The right-fit LMS promotes networked learning and social connectedness. A district-wide LMS is no longer a perk; it’s an integral part of distance learning pedagogy. As Nicholas Negroponte (1998) said in his prescient article, "Beyond Digital": “Like air and drinking water, being digital will be noticed only by its absence, not its presence.” COVID-19 demanded that school systems pro-vide learning continuity at scale and the LMS will prove to be a ubiquitous presence in the future of learning.
References
Byron, D. (2020, June). Future of remote learning (Google Slides). Presented at Keep Michigan Learning workgroup meeting, Michigan Virtual. Champion, A. (2015). Self-efficacy and online learning for expelled students. The Exchange, 4(1). ssrn.com/abstract=2676862Guide to selecting an LMS in K–12. (2020, June 25). kmlearning.wpengine.com/guide-to-selecting-an-lms-for-k-12/Heinrich, C., Darling-Aduana, J., Good, A., & Huiping, C. (2019, May 14). A look inside online learning settings in high schools.Brookings. Retrieved from www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2019/05/14/a-look-inside-online-learning-settings-in-high-schools/Jakes, D. (2020, June 21). Designing a virtual third place for schools. David Jakes Designs. davidjakesdesigns.com/ideas/2020/6/20/designing-a-virtual-third-place-for-schoolsLoeb, S. (2020, Mar. 20). How effective is online learning? What the research does and doesn’t tell us. EdWeek.www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/03/23/how-effective-is-online-learning-what-the.htmlReggio Emilia Approach. (2020, June 25).www.reggiochildren.it/en/reggio-emilia-approach/Oct-2020-43.2-ELQ.indd 4Oct-2020-43.2-ELQ.indd 410/28/20 5:45 PM10/28/20 5:45 PMweb.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED6-12.htmlNegroponte, N. (1998, Jan. 12). Beyond digital. Wired.