The COVID-19 health crisis has had a major impact on learning around the world with around 1.4 billion children in 186 countries affected by school closures due to the pandemic (World Economic Forum, 2020) highlighted in Figure 14. In order to ensure continuity, institutions have had to move education online with teaching and learning being undertaken at a distance. The demand for online learning has been huge (DeVaney et al., 2020, no pagination).
Before the pandemic, educational technology was largely seen as a tool for innovators and early adopters. The Coronavirus health crisis has changed this perception and educational technology has been pulled into the mainstream, speeding up the adoption process by an estimated 5-10 years (Ash, 2020a).
The abrupt closure of schools and move to online learning has led to institutions having to rapidly move to online delivery and it is unlikely that institutions had the time to develop a supportive institutional culture with time and space for exploring tools and developing the skills to use them, aspects that King and Boyatt (2014) suggest are necessary for successful implementation of e-learning.
As time was a major factor and institutions had to react quickly the challenge was to leverage technologies available to them in order to transfer teaching and learning to online delivery on a basic substitution model (Puentedura, 2006; Hill and Moore, 2020) where technology acts as a direct substitute with no change.
A large majority of institutions substituted the face to face delivery model replacing a live lecture with a synchronous virtual classroom. This become apparent by the surge in adoption of technologies such as Zoom, Blackboard Collaborate or Microsoft Teams which allow the educator to mimic the face-to-face learning experience. Educators unfamiliar with delivery via Virtual Classrooms have played it safe, but in order to enhance delivery and the affordances of the technology they need to consider the features of Virtual Classrooms they could utilise to improve students learning as highlighted in Bower, (2006) and embed the art of conversation and dialogue. Laurillard, 2002; Mercer, 2008; emphasise the importance of communication, interaction and dialogue between students and their peers and between students and their educators in online learning design to enable active collaboration and engagement.
Figure 15 and 16 explain the SAMR model in more detail.
Zoom, by its own admission is traditionally a video conferencing platform for enterprise has become a high-profile, popular tool during the pandemic, with daily users spiking at 300 million in April 2020, Zoom (2020b). Unfortunately, these high-level usage statistics are not broken down on a granular level to show types of users or technical features. Zoom, 2020a reference some 90,000 schools that took them up on their offer to use the platform for free during the coronavirus outbreak.
Zoom is being used for diverse purposes, from business meetings to taking exercise classes and even to organise virtual parties. Indeed, the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was seen using Zoom for a cabinet meeting, (Forbes, 2020).
The popularity of Zoom, which has led to the high levels of adoption mentioned above, may well be due to how the tool can be used to simulate a classroom and synchronous, real-time learning and as a basic way of maintaining dialogue and interaction with educators and students. As noted by Starkey (2011), the first aspect of learning in a digitally enhanced society is the ability to connect and collaborate with others beyond the restrictions of a (physical) classroom. The Zoom tool allows educators to provide a learning environment where students can continue to collaborate and connect with each other, thereby promoting meaningful learning. However, the rushed adoption of technology caused by the pandemic will have meant very little or no time for educators to evaluate a variety of tools or research online learning pedagogies. The functionalities Zoom offers allow teachers to interact with a group of students, share content, and collaborative tools which give teachers the ability to form breakout groups, conduct polls, annotate a digital whiteboard and group chats, all activities that are very similar to those that would be used in an actual physical classroom.
The question is once institutions move from emergency teaching and using virtual classrooms as direct substitutions for the lecture to focus on online delivery, will the high usage of virtual classrooms continue or will we start to see an increase in other technologies as educators look to differentiate themselves from the competition and deliver online learning to its potential.
Universities are in a difficult financial position with heavy reliance on large international numbers (Batty and Hall, 2020) and although the government have agreed they can continue to charge the maximum tuition fees they will be expected to deliver quality online learning (Stubley, 2020) and replicating face-to-face delivery models online will not achieve this. Universities need to switch from the substitution model to augment, modify and attempt to redefine their online delivery to ensure students are getting the best experience possible and “make improvements to how they teach online” (DeVaney et al,. 2020, no pagination).
The SAMR model produced for Figure 17, suggests ways institutions can move to transform their online learning experiences to ensure they deliver the best educational experience by embedding cognitive presence, teaching presence and social presence (Garrison et al., 2000) and enabling conversation and dialogue between students and their peers and students and educators (Laurillard, 2002; Mercer, 2008).
Virtual Classrooms can allow students to take increased control over their learning and enabling andragogic practices, (Bower, 2006) taking into account their metacommunicative strategies which links directly to staff digital capabilities and explaining their approach.
The concern with institutions just focusing on mimicking the face to face with a live stream and not taking advantage of pedagogic practices are that the learning experience and potentially learning outcomes would be jeopardised. The danger here is educators and students will then develop a negative view of online learning, which in turn has a future impact on technology adoption (Mehta et al.,) This will make it harder to meet the future demands of education and result in reverting to old delivery models.
Long-term impact will depend on human behaviour and how willing people are to adopt digital solutions that are designed to enhance, rather than replicate face-to-face learning and experience. (Ash, 2020b). “Obstacles were primarily institutional rather than technological” (Ross, 2020a). In the week all schools around the world moved online naturally the technology struggled to cope with the demand; this will have negatively impacted the educators using those systems for the first time and it will be difficult to build their trust and confidence back in those systems.
This suggests that it is possible that once social distancing restrictions have been relaxed, many institutions will return to the brick and mortar model of education and are deeming this move a one-year fix, (Ross, 2020b).
Technology Adoption in HE 