Online Learning Simply Isn't Working, And That's a Good Thing

After nearly 10 months of distance learning, and even longer thinking about how the pandemic will be regarded by historians one-hundred years from now, something has become clear to me: online learning as it currently functions will be historically considered as something that, en masse, did not work. Be it those memes about inept doctors cheating their way through online med school, or the overall sentiment I have gathered from my peers, it is clear that there are negative long-term effects resulting from learning that relies more on technology than it does the actual human behind the computer screen. Four Rivers is a unique community, and, speaking from this retrospective mindset, I think we have the resources to give online learning a better reputation than something that drains its participants. We need to fight our instincts to stick to the status quo when the status quo for online school doesn’t accommodate our human needs during this stressful time in history. As we jump into the second semester of what could be an all-remote year at our school, these are the things we need to think about.

I want to point out that there are certain systems that thrive in online learning, as well as many individuals who do it all the time. Online school is an asset to people who work better in a non-social environment, who need a more individualized curriculum, who can’t commute to a school or university, who require a more accessible and flexible schedule, etc. Technology is more accommodating than I can comprehend, and I have heard many success stories of online schooling for institutions that specialize in it. But because the majority of education in the US, let alone Four Rivers, was not designed to thrive online, we run into a colossal problem, eclipsed by the fact that online learning is seemingly so benign.

What I mean by this is that on a day to day basis, the idea of doing school online does not seem threatening to our overall education because there are still ways to communicate information, assign classwork, and meet with teachers and students. But when you zoom out (no pun intended) and consider 10 compounded months of learning being restricted to the very skeleton of school-- that of information and communication-- we begin to see the sadness, fatigue, and pain it has caused our community. But because students are still turning in work and teachers are still assigning it, we aren’t willing to give it up. This creates the apparition that distance learning is working, that we are getting by on what we need. But when we examine the inner workings of remote learning, we discover machinery that only neglects happiness. The very flesh of our school’s virtue has melted away to reveal nothing but robotic algorithms: productivity and organization where compassion and courage should be.

Distance learning at Four Rivers is functioning under the false notion that it can thrive off of these algorithms. The thing is, we don’t actually want to be able to thrive in this way. If we were able to seamlessly graft our curriculum into an online platform that doesn’t even require we see each other’s faces, it would say some pretty bleak things about said curriculum. Four Rivers is designed for movement, for hands and feet, for exploring the beauty that is varying learning styles. Our teachers are doing creative things to replicate the experience of the in-person learning mystique: grappling with a quadratic equation puzzle, a list of uncontextualized newspaper articles from World War II, or the mysterious results of an algae lab experiment. But we all miss the academic excitement that is lost when our education is transferred through artificial platforms like Zoom and Google Classroom. While creative teaching and learning is still happening pretty successfully, excessive screen time achemizes learning and teaching into computer anxiety and a bad headache. We need to stop trying to shove a square peg through a round hole. Perhaps Four Rivers isn’t fit for online learning. But we are certainly well-equipped to come up with something even better.

To clarify, this is not to advocate for in-person learning right now. We can’t return inside until major progress has been made in vaccination and repression of the newest COVID-19 strand, and that is indisputable. This said, we need to recognize that pandemic-era learning is not a binary: either online or not online. We can tune into the vocabulary of “remote” and “distance” without it meaning “online-lonely-endless-sadness.” We can skew our curriculum away from platforms like Google Classroom that promote productivity and trample self-care. We can reduce Zoom hours and support students (and teachers) through means of encouraging self-connection, mindfulness, creativity, connection with the outdoors, or whatever a healthy brain means to them. Obviously these online platforms should continue to supplement communication and organization, which are still useful tools for learning and sustaining peace-of-mind. However, we need to stop treating them like suboptimal substitutes for human connection and recognize that they are part of an entirely separate realm of communication, devoid of anything sustainably joyful. If it were not the center of every remote school day, Zoom could become something chosen, not forced, because I do still love doing online geography games with my crew every now and then.

All in all, we need to center our curriculum around basic human needs if we have any hope of withstanding the cruel hand that history will deal to pandemic-era learning. Yes, this is true for the entire broken education, which has students unable to eat and sleep when they need to, but due to the stress of the major historical events we are experiencing, it is especially true now. It can be hard to step away from the sheer need to get stuff done, give students information, and prepare to send them to college, a system that happens to require a lot of getting stuff done and obtaining information. I believe, however, that if Four Rivers refocuses its distance learning objectives to accommodate the well-being of our community and its individuals, with online tools as aids, not impairments, the future will thank us. And we can stop wondering why we feel so bad all the time and try to make things better.

I urge administration to consider this when planning throughout the rest of distance learning. I urge students to vocalize their needs. This school exists to teach us. We have a great deal of influence on how that will continue to happen.