Written by: Professor Matthew Allen, Institute for Social Change, University of Tasmania (Email: matthew.allen@utas.edu.au Twitter: @xnetcrit)
Introduction
It is now some three months since the World Health Organisation announced that the novel coronavirus first detected in late 2019 in China, the cause of the disease COVID-19, had become a pandemic (WHO, 2020). The calamitous nature of this outbreak, and the risks it posed to health, have led to extensive and extraordinary restrictions on social and economic life across many countries and are causing a profound disruption to the norms and conventions of human interaction. In the initial crisis response, where actions and reactions were measured against daily rises in cases and mortality, our collective temporal horizon foreshortened to the needs of the moment, or extended outwards to a remote time when a vaccine might emerge. This transition to the conditions of survival and safety in a pandemic that had long been feared, but for which the world was ill-prepared, did not easily allow for the realization that this disease, and the necessary measures to cope with its infectious and often lethal qualities, will be with humanity for many years to come. Now, however, we grasp this new reality: for the foreseeable future, all social interactions involving even quite short periods of physical proximity with other humans, especially where such interactions involve different people from different places, will be fraught with risk and hemmed in between their necessity for life to continue and the danger they pose to life itself. This awful calculus can be seen all around: from the stark choices facing poverty-stricken millions in poor nations who must work, despite the risks of disease, or starve; to the moral contradictions involved in deciding to protest against racist injustice and potentially worsen a disease already revealing the racial and ethnic inequities in our world.
University education has been deeply affected deeply by the public health responses enacted to mitigate the risks of the COVID-19 pandemic. The World Bank estimated that, in April, more than 200 million students were affected across 175 countries, with campuses all but closed and students studying from home, if at all (World Bank, 2020). By their nature, universities are all about proximity, the mingling of strangers, the close pursuit of learning in company, accompanied by extensive social and professional engagements between students and staff. They are also, in many respects, essential to the long-term health and wealth of nations and their citizens and, while short-term interruptions to learning may be accommodated, the longer disruption occurs the worse that the individual and collective economic consequences are. Thus, in miniature, universities present a compelling example of our current challenge: how best to mitigate competing risks while preserving the institutions and practices that, on balance, offer hope and opportunity.
Higher education institutions are, however, meeting this challenge with some advantages not widely available to all parts of society. Universities, particularly in developed nations, are already deeply engaged in forms of networked, digital knowledge work that are not dependent on physical proximity; they often have the necessary reserves of capital, both financial and human, to shift educational programs normally conducted on campuses to the world of distributed and networked interaction. On the other hand, there is still a common understanding that a university exists and functions precisely because it is a place where diverse people come together, to collaborate, to teach and to learn, in shared time and space. We should understand the discursive construction of this apparent truth, and not ascribe to it an inherent validity; we should also recognise cultural and national differences that vary the extent of this understanding. Nevertheless, attendance at a university remains a powerful, defining institutional norm, both for students and universities whose institutional prestige and wealth is deeply imbricated with the land they occupy. Persistent criticisms of distance education over many years have contributed to this norm, privileging face-to-face learning over other modes. While opponents of distance education have often been animated by political-economic concerns, worried that corporate interests might gain from the ascendency of online learning and a breakdown of traditional campus-based scholarly institutions (e.g., Croy, 1998: 325-326), a common mode of attack has been to question the nature of the learning and to conflate concerns about governance and cost with the mode of delivery (Baggaley, 2008: 39-43; see also Keegan, 1994 for historical background).
Of course, some universities are already highly adept at and dependent on technology-mediated distributed learning (even if they also run face-to-face programs). For the much greater number who have not such experience and expertise, for whom the place of learning justifies and defines their existence, the COVID-19 pandemic has therefore been as much an ontological challenge as a practical one. Indeed, such universities are likely to feel the effects from the enforced transformation of their programs to be distributed or taught online long after students return. For these institutions, too, there was the immediate challenge of responding urgently to their students’ needs for continue access to higher education whilst various forms of lockdown, but all without the capacity to be co-present, on campus. As one university president from the USA summed it up:
For …institutions of higher education (IHEs), faculty members, and students—it’s not what they want, but it’s what they are stuck doing through the end of this academic year (LeBlanc, 2020).
And, for better or worse, and probably longer than just until the end of this year, academics and their students are stuck with the fact that distance, rather than proximity, now defines all of our educational endeavours, rather than just for the minority whose attendance on campus was never possible.
The Internet, space and time
Thus, in this time of social distancing, closed national borders, and home isolation, it would seem reasonable to imagine the Internet largely as a technology for the management of spatial disruptions and the re-instantiation of co-present togetherness in virtual forms. Certainly, this approach conforms with the original understandings of networked communication. In the early days of the Internet, much of the collective cultural fascination with this new technology seemed caught up in exploring its capacity to change humans’ understanding and use of space, with a strong emphasis on the way that apparently borderless, global interconnection liberated people from conventional constraints. Geographers, as much as communication scholars, were drawn to the analysis of the Internet (e.g., Batty, 1997). Much was made of the capacity of the Internet to create virtual spaces, either through acts of textual inventiveness and imagination (discussed in Soukup, 2006), or in more elaborate visually constructed shared online ‘worlds’ (whether early iterations such as Habitat, Morningstar and Farmer, 1990; or much later versions such as Second Life, e.g. Krotoski et al., 2009). Significant commentary also explored, often enthusiastically, the way that the Internet would deterritorialise human society, especially the nation-state – evident for example in the long-running debate over Internet governance and the regulation of content (as discussed in Goldsmith and Wu, 2006). More pragmatically, most early Internet users found positive benefits in being able to access information, experience community, transact business, and generally engage with the world around them without necessarily having to occupy a space other than that in which they were using their computer.
What soon became apparent, however, was that the Internet also had profound effects on humans’ experiences of time. Indeed, given the resolute refusal of the nation-state to cede to the global Internet, and the ongoing impact of where one lived in privileging or denying access, it now seems reasonable to conclude that the temporal destabilisation of the Internet has been more significant than its effects on space, not least because humans routinely measure and assess their spatial lives through the costs and benefits to their time. These effects on human temporality have been both systemic and highly individual, as the following discussion shows.
Robert Hassan, one of the most thoughtful analysts of the Internet and time, provides a compelling argument that human life is now organised according to very different temporal parameters than in the times before the network:
Network time is a form of time that displaces or undermines the clock time context that has regularised polity, economy and society since the industrial revolution. Network time may be seen (experienced) as a temporal fragmentation of time(s) into numberless network contexts; into the time(s) that we create and experience online and in the increasingly networked forms of work and education and leisure that fill our waking hours. …. (2013: 361)
Hassan’s contention is that “although the times of the network are infinitely fragmented … they all are governed by a network logic (a techno-logic driven by commercial competition) that orients almost all network users to an accelerated existence” (362) and that, as a result, stability (both economic and political) is less evident, leading to further opportunities for the exploitation of labour by capital and the dominance of the powerful over the less powerful.
More pragmatic and locally experienced changes in time were evident to some, early on the Internet’s emergence into society. Starting from Durkheim’s presumption that time is socially constructed, Lee and Liebenau noted at the turn of the century, after several years of Internet adoption, that:
Users have the opportunity to alter their temporal perceptions by virtue of having access at any time … Internet servers are (supposed to be) always switched on. Their constant presence means that all materials are always available, and in aggregate the Internet is as accessible in the middle of the night as at the height of the working day (2000: 51)
As Lee and Liebenau cautioned, however, “That access gives the illusion of being instantaneous” (51: my emphasis), and they point both to the different ways in which collaboration online might occur when users are not equally instantaneous in their actions, and the frustrations when the “fiction” of immediacy is replaced by delays in downloading and using.
Later, and as the even more dramatic effects of social networking and related online community platforms were becoming evident, Gregg and Driscoll identified one of the most salient emergent properties of these new applications of communications technologies:
Just as mobile phones enable asynchronous communication to thread through everyday life, allowing one to conceive of and manage friends, meetings or solitude differently, online culture downplays the necessity of being in the same space, time-zone or instant in order to communicate intimately. … The temporality of online culture changes our expectations of intimacy. Online culture has a rapid and urgent immediacy in some respects — aren’t you online now? — but it also drifts in and out of different sites and experiences. (2008: 134).
This apparently new quality of interaction made visible how time both mediates human interaction and is itself reshaped by desires for and enactments of that interaction. Barely a decade later, social relations across the world now have deep reliance on this quality of temporal malleability and the loss of a clear distinction between being ‘together in time’ and not. Gone are the days when the Internet was largely understood as a new ‘space’ – cyberspace – wherein positive social relations can be produced between people who “have never even met physically” (Peris, et al., 2002: 43). Now the networking of individuals and institutions creates new interactions between the physical and the virtual to the point where that distinction is largely meaningless, an early differentiation of human activities now undone by the ubiquity of devices and connectivity (see Brandtzaeg & Lüders, 2018: 2-4 for one discussion of the consequences of the new importance of differently experienced time over space).
Ultimately, what we can discern is that the Internet has changed the relationships which humans understand between space and time, place and rhythm. One’s sense of time and sense of space never exist without the other, but digital culture grew up as the way to experience them together differently. As that culture matured, extended, and mapped itself onto all life, rather than just the life spent ‘online’, so it was itself changed to accommodate the way space and time interrelate without computer mediation, creating hybrid formations of presence and absence within and outside of shared time and space.
The Internet and distance/distant learning
The distinct spatio-temporal qualities of networked computer communication made it immediately, and eminently, suitable to extend and transform existing approaches to distance education and, indeed, to rethink education itself, even as far back as the 1970s (e.g., Hiltz and Turoff’s The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer, 1978). Given limited public access to the Internet until the mid-1990s, it was not, however until two decades after Hiltz’s pioneering work that the promise started to be made good. At this time, Moore’s theory of transactional distance played a significant role in the way the Internet came to be used to develop and extend distance education (Moore, 1993). While not without its critics (see, for example, Kang and Gyorke, 2008), the theory had a profound effect on understanding the ways that technologies might, rather than compensate for the assumed primacy of physical proximity, constitute a whole new kind of relationship between learners and teachers and between learners themselves. While it is common to understand that “the essential distance in distance education is transactional, not spatial or temporal” (Gorsky and Caspi, 2005: 2), the theory does not deny the material impacts of space and time but, instead, understands them as the terrain across which humans must travel so as to come into sufficient close pedagogical proximity to have success.
One of the enduring (and valid) criticisms of distance education prior to its transformation via online learning had been the lack of opportunity for timely interaction between students and their peers and teachers when learning was dependent on paper or broadcast media (e.g. Harting & Erthal, 2005: 35-39). While the Internet offered incremental (though valuable) improvements in the transmission of information to and from students, in the form of curriculum, content and assessment, its revolutionary power came from the provision of opportunities for communication. Such possibilities, at the very least, matched those available on campus and, in many cases, exceeded them. Garrison, for example, argued that communication of this kind enabled different kinds of cognition and self-awareness in learning, that were much harder to achieve in classrooms and so, thinking of asynchronous learning as a substitute for the classroom “simply misses the point that we are operating in a new medium with unique properties” (2003: 48). He concluded that this approach combines:
the stimulation and feedback of a collaborative and socially shared approach with reflective inquiry and personal responsibility to construct meaning of the individual. Asynchronous online learning has the potential to support higher-order learning in an effective and unprecedented manner (57).
Even more importantly, communication led to a sense of connection between learners and thus enabled students to experience their studies in common with others, in a learning community (Caroline Haythornthwaite, a leading scholar of Internet communications, is a key source for both the research into its effects and advice on how to achieve it, e.g., 2006; 2007). Community has a critical role in successful education, because it engenders:
…a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, that they have duties and obligations to each other and to the school, and that they possess a shared faith that members’ educational needs will be met (Rovai, 2000: 287)
Such an effect, while achieved through a very different temporal format that better suited the needs for flexibility and persistence over a longer period of time required by distant learners, was the most powerful form of equivalence to the way students learned on campus. Indeed, at times in my experience, the sense of community was greater precisely because students, rather than the institution itself, took responsibility for its maintenance, in a manner that directly exemplified the power of the virtual communities which dominated online life in the pre-social media period of the Internet.
The dominance of the largely text-based, time-shifted nature of such communications was in part a reflection of the capacity constraints within the emerging networked societies where online learning was developing. Without reliable and high-speed broadband, and ready availability of applications such as Zoom and associated audio-visual devices, there was simply no way to conceive of computer-mediated distance education equitably without putting the focus on forms of communication such as bulletin boards which were more usable and available. As Falloon noted a decade ago, most of the research and practice in this field continued to emphasise asynchronous communications (2011: 188-191), even as a new wave of experimentation was beginning to understand the potential of a shift to real-time, shared communication.
One challenge in this shift, from the late 2000s onwards, was a tendency for researchers and practitioners to assume that, now, with the advent of the right tools and connectivity, online learning could ‘become’ what it had always until then failed to be, which was a direct copy of the ‘best’ form of learning within a classroom. For example, McBrien et al. commenced their assessment of synchronous communications for such learning by stating:
Thus, improved teaching and learning strategies are needed to provide students not only the convenience of distance education but also the kind of access to real-time interaction with the instructor and class peers that simulates the traditional classroom setting (2009: 1)
Not surprisingly, their conclusions were that synchronous communication was an “improvement” over the traditions of online learning, perhaps reflecting an inherent bias towards the face-to-face environment with which they were more familiar. Similarly, Ng framed his research by contrasting online learning with the “real classroom” found at a campus (2007: 1), as if it were the standard against which online education had to be judged. Johnson (2006), however, in reviewing a wide array of research findings, found that neither mode was more ‘preferred’ or ‘authentic’ in its equivalence to the on-campus experience. His work shows that they differ; and have different effects and uses.
These differences have been hard for researchers to pin down. However, the work of Giesbers et al. (2014) is significant for identifying that the variable most likely to affect the success of using either or both modes of communication in online learning is the autonomy and self-determination of the learner. They noted that:
Online learning settings are much more open and flexible than classroom settings, because they offer a limited amount of external regulation and structure, and thereby allow a learner to be more autonomous in making choices regarding their learning behaviours (33)
As a result, some learners (who have limited self-determination and are more dependent on teachers) struggle regardless of the kind of technology used. While not able to establish their results strongly, Giesbers et al. nevertheless found that the greater success of a mix of asynchronous and synchronous communications between and with students seemed to obtain because less autonomous learners were able to benefit from the perceived immediacy of response in clarifying and supporting their learning (2014: 45). Timeliness, rather than the outright simulation of being ‘present’ in a classroom (within which, in fact, there can be less opportunities to speak and listen than online), has been the great benefit for such students.
Conclusion
In early 2020, across the world millions of students continued with, or prepared to return to, their university studies. The vast majority were attending a campus and their experiences and expectations were that face-to-face learning was the dominant and most important form of higher education. For them, unlike the significant minority of students already engaged in online learning (estimated to be around 21% of all university students in the twelve largest higher-education providing nations: Qayyum and Zawacki-Richter, 2019: 129), the pandemic has been profoundly unsettling and they, along with their teachers, have been thrust into a world of distanced learning for which they are ill-prepared. It is not surprising that, in the main, universities responded to this situation simply by replacing timetabled co-present classes with video conferencing between a single teacher and many students. They thereby simulated what the viral outbreak had taken away, while relying where they could on the fact most students could also access written curriculum in electronic form via the web. Indeed, so fast and extensive was this uptake that even the companies providing such technologies, such as Zoom, were taken by surprise (Lau, 2020). Moreover, what else might they have done, given that students were expecting such classes and academics had no time for the development of a comprehensive approach to learning at distance. Any sense of dissatisfaction at the resulting ‘thinness’ of the educational connection between learners should be weighed against the far more severe suffering caused by the disease.
But, as we contemplate a return to the new normal of living within a COVID-19 world, instead of shutting ourselves away from it, we need as educators to remember the earlier times of asynchronous learning which, through its re-arrangement of time, affords greater agency of learning, and challenges assumptions of the primacy of the educator’s authority within the room, or on the Zoom. Academic educators should, in my view, engage in a rapid consideration of the cognitive and social benefits of modes of interaction which better suit autonomous learners who can be motivated to invest more heavily in managing their own learning, outside of places of instruction. Already, academics are finding that this older mode of communication is benefitting students who, once they get over the shock of not being on campus, are finding that classes transferred into video conferencing do not work as well as might have been expected. Yet, it is not necessary to return entirely to the past. Lowenthal et al., 2020 is an important example of this approach, reporting on the use of asynchronous video. I would suggest that their successes are consistent with the fact that such video communication / publication is now a dominant form in current popular cultural uses of the Internet, found on TikTok, Instagram and so on (see Allen, 2020 for a discussion on how successful provision of online learning is as much function of dominant digital culture as of educational norms).
Equally, we need to be alert to the way that the widespread use of semi-synchronous social media in today’s world has profoundly changed students’ abilities to interact and use the dominant forms of asynchronous communication found in most online learning. Recuperating digital education from its current, panicked fascination with synchronous video conferencing cannot avoid the fact that computer-mediated communication has already moved on from the days of bulletin boards, emails, and forums from which traditional distance education benefited. Now, our communications online are formations of semi-synchronicity, neither one nor the other technologically, but determined by the social expectations of and on users for more, or less, immediacy in exchange. The malleability of time experienced online (quick and slow both at once depending on perspective), and the resolution of expectations about schedules, timeliness, co-presence, and the like, suggest the need to inform our development of new forms of digital education with a recognition that the pervasive “technology-mediated communicative environment detaches the individual from their co-located interaction to become immersed in a co-present relation with those at a distance” (Andrade, 2014: 7) and enables people to negotiate the limitations imposed on their individual agency by the restrictive nature of many spaces we occupy in daily life.
Ultimately, the pandemic has acted as an epistemic shock to our higher education order of things. The dominance of the ‘truth’ that learning in a classroom is best has been undone. Now, perhaps, we can see that while there are good reasons sometimes to use classrooms, or equivalent learning spaces such as labs, workshops, and studios that better deliver an authentic learning experience, there is also reason to question the way that classrooms also function as spaces to govern and maintain the authority of the educator. Similarly, the timetable is now more evidently a technology to regulate and produce orderly students, whose temporal agency is surrendered when the attend class. As we continue to live in a world of more distant relations between learners and teachers, the effective response needs to be grounded first and foremost in a recognition that education is more likely to succeed when students are provided more freedom to develop their autonomy as learners. These freedoms can be experienced and developed through forms of technologically mediated education that decentre the timetable, along with the class, and in new ways return to the earlier insights from distance education about community, engagement, and collective responsibility for learning.
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