Can Online Schooling Be Made Effective and Equitable?

Thoughts about technology that is inclusive, trusted, and creates a more sustainable world

These posts represent my personal views on the future of the digital economy powered by the cloud and artificial intelligence. Unless otherwise indicated, they do not represent the official views of Microsoft.

As the pandemic continues its bumpy course toward what we all hope will be its eventual conclusion, parents, politicians, and teachers are debating what to do about school. The enormity of the question is evident. By early April of this year, some 1.5 billion schoolchildren in the world had been forced out of their classrooms by coronavirus lockdowns. Today the question is whether and when it will be safe to send them back to school.

Opinions on both sides are strongly held. Last month more than 1500 members of the UK’s Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health signed a letter stating that prolonged school closures risked “scarring the life chances of a generation of young people.” The American Academy of Pediatrics has advanced similar arguments to urge a return to school this fall with suitable safety measures.

Outside the US, the Washington Post reports that many countries are not only reopening their schools but even lifting some social distancing policies for students such as extra spacing between desks. According to the Post, this is true not only in countries like Japan where the coronavirus never achieved pandemic levels, but also in countries like Belgium which suffered devastating mortality rates, and even in countries which, like Israel, are experiencing a resurgence in infections. Many countries, particularly in Asia, have made masks obligatory for children returning to classrooms, but some countries have made them optional, including Austria, Canada, Denmark, Norway, the UK, and Sweden.

The scientific consensus appears to be that pre-teen children are at extremely low risk from COVID and, according to some studies, may not even be able to readily transmit the disease to adults. However, susceptibility of teenagers may be higher. In these circumstances, it seems clear that the risk to teachers or older adults who live at home with the children cannot be neglected, particularly for those who suffer from known high-risk comorbidities such as obesity or diabetes. In the United States, where public schools are subject to local rather than national political authority, teachers’ unions in several large cities such as Los Angeles have expressed vocal opposition to the idea of returning to physical classrooms any time soon. Many teachers have also expressed personal anguish at the risk they may run from contact with their students. It is a notable irony that public opinion thus appears torn between the conflicting views of the two professions most directly concerned with the welfare of children: the teachers and the pediatricians.

I’m certainly not going to wade into this debate. As the parent of a school-aged child who has been at home since March, I know that both sides make good and important arguments. My purpose is simply to point out that as a practical matter, given the absence of consensus, many children in the US (if not in Europe or Asia) will likely still be out of their regular classrooms this fall and obliged to rely on online learning. The critical question then becomes: what can we do to ensure that this online learning takes place in the best possible conditions?

Two kinds of concerns have been raised about online learning for schoolchildren. The first is the claim by some that it is less effective than classroom teaching even in the best of circumstances. The second is that, whatever its effectiveness might be in optimal circumstances, the actual circumstances in which many children are now experiencing it are far less than optimal or equal. I want to consider each of these concerns in turn.

Regarding the question of whether online learning can ever match the effectiveness of classrooms, I think there are grounds for cautious optimism. Many things have to go right for online learning to work well, and some essential technology pieces are still immature, but the potential is there.

Online learning in schools already had a long and often successful history before the coronavirus hit. The best example is the popularity of “flipped classrooms.” Here traditional classroom lectures are replaced by videos that students watch at home, while traditional homework is replaced by in-class exercises performed under the teacher’s supervision. The advantage of flipped classrooms is that they free teachers to devote precious class time to one-on-one and small group coaching, which can be especially beneficial for students who are struggling with the material.

But flipped classrooms require high-quality video lessons, which not all teachers are skilled at producing. To meet that need a whole new (mostly non-profit) industry has sprung up offering video lectures aimed at high school and middle school students, of which the most notable example is the now-famous Kahn Academy, which now has more than 13,000 videos, mostly 10 to 15 minutes long, that provide broad and deep coverage of core school subjects in math, science, history, and language. Not surprisingly, Kahn Academy’s popularity has surged during the pandemic, with the number of users on any given day rising to 30 million by April of this year, up 50% to 70% over 2019 levels.

Of course, flipped classrooms do not eliminate the physical classroom. On the contrary, their effectiveness depends on face-to-face interaction between teachers and students to ensure that the content of the videos is mastered. If the 100% online learning made necessary in some places by the pandemic is to work, teachers will need to do more than conduct mass video conferences with their charges. They will also need to interact with children one-on-one or in small groups as they work through exercises. That’s possible, but it requires more sophisticated software than consumer videoconferencing apps, and it also requires teacher training, which requires adequate public funding. AI, which is already being used in some classroom settings, will naturally play an important role in online learning as well, guiding students as they learn, quizzing their mastery of concepts, and monitoring their engagement.

In short, there is no doubting that online learning can be highly effective with the right software, high-quality educational content such as videos, and properly trained and resourced teachers. But I’m not confident that every schoolchild who will be at home trying to learn online this fall will have those things. I’ve written before about how unequal access to good Internet connections leads to grave injustice in a time when so much of our daily lives is conducted online. I won’t repeat those arguments here. But I do want to emphasize that the injustice is especially acute when children who were already underprivileged lose all chance of learning because they don’t have good Internet or even an adequate computing device to use it.

Jamya Eubanks of Jackson, Mississippi, 8 years old, with a math workbook that her mother bought to help with her schoolwork. Jamya does not have Internet or a PC in her home. Source: Wall Street Journal, photo by Andrea Morales

Well before the pandemic, a clear and worrisome digital learning gap was already in evidence, as the nearby chart based on research conducted in 2018 confirms.

Bringing good Internet connections to everyone is a goal we can all agree on. Policymakers in both the United States and Europe understand what they need to do, and are moving in the right direction. But in my view, they are not always moving fast enough. A lost year of schooling is something that for many children will be almost impossible to make up for later. Children in low-income families and in rural areas urgently need help now. They need adequate Internet connections and in many cases they also need devices.

As I write this, numerous proposals to provide additional public funding to support schools and schoolchildren are being debated in Washington and other capitals. Let’s all call on policymakers to act quickly, and hope that they do.