Preferences for learning modality following COVID19

Yesterday evening I came across a post by Tony Bates where he shared some findings from some recent reports on faculty (and student) preferences for learning in a post-pandemic world. I haven't read the reports yet, but I had some initial thoughts based on Tony's high-level overview of those three reports.  

Two big things jumped out at me. The first is that students and faculty aren't on the same page (for the most part), and faculty still overwhelmingly prefer on-campus.  Tony notes that, at least in the EDUCASE case, compared to pre-covid numbers, more faculty have expressed an interest in something other than purely face-to-face (about 79% pre-covid, with 50% now).

Tyton Partner's Analysis of Modality Preferences

The first thing I noticed above is where students and faculty fall in their respective preferences.  If taken together, something other than purely face-to-face is a clear winner for student preferences.  Now, what that something else actually is...well, that's up for debate. I honestly don't like how they've broken up Blended and Hybrid. In their definition of Hybrid we seem to be using a kind of Allen & Seaman definition of 30-80% online (the traditional definition of blended/hybrid), whereas the Blended definition here appears to be somewhat of an inverse: 80-90% on-site with some online. This seems like the worst of both worlds, sort of like having a job that's "Hybrid" but requiring you to go into the office four days per week 😅.  The numbers on Hyflex surprise me on the student side, but not the faculty side.  The various *flex approaches require A LOT of work for the instructor without requiring a lot of skin in the game for students: they can choose to be virtual at any time without much warning to the instructional staff to allow them to prep for the changing classroom dynamics.  I sometimes feel like *flex courses are students responding "maybe" to an invitation when they clearly want to decline it but feel bad about doing so 😂

Back in 2014, when I started my EdD at Athabasca, I had a chat with Pat Fahy (now retired) during one of our breaks from orientation. This was about the reason why students choose distance education over physically proximal education, and his response was "It's always the parking, stupid!"  Of course, it goes beyond parking.  In Boston parking is one thing ($15 per park on-campus!), plus traffic, plus coming after work, plus gas money, plus tolls for some people coming from farther away. The monetary and time costs add up.  Of course, pre-pandemic not everyone thought about this.  We were all in a routine, so when the idea of DE came up, the usual (and very automated) response was "Oh, Online is fine, but I learn better on campus"🤷‍♂️. I think what we are seeing in a post-pandemic world is that when students have had a break from their routines, and they can step back and do a compare/contrast critically, they may choose other options.  In fact, we see from the data above that most students picked some option other than purely face-to-face, which is telling IMO.

EDUCAUSE analysis of faculty preferences

In EDUCAUSE's report,  one of the reasons why faculty prefer on-campus is to have a connection with their learners. Again, having taught folks how to teach online (for over 12 years now... oh how does time fly...) this is something I've heard frequently: I prefer teaching on-campus because I can see my students, get a temperature read in the classroom, connect better (whatever that means), etc.  I think this may be true for some folks, but it's not true for all, and certainly not in all cases.  It definitely privileges students who are extroverts and engage more in those social spaces. Assuming you can read people's facial expressions can also bring you to incorrect conclusions: I often went to class, for example, after work - so by that time I was away from home for about 10 hours already.  Any apathy or boredom on my face was probably fatigue, otherwise, I wouldn't be in class. I am not convinced that we can accurately read people's faces and determine their level of engagement (maybe a lit review I should dive into one of these days).  

Ultimately what this need to connect points me to is this: instructional staff are replicating their own classroom experiences in their own teaching and they have never learned new ways of being.  Most folks who've been active in virtual spaces (chatrooms, BBS, IMs, Social Media) can tell you that they've felt those kinds of closeness in virtual spaces that people express having felt in physically-proximal spaces (yes, there are probably a lot of asterisks in this claim). It's something that's learned and experienced, but it requires practice (just as F2F requires practice...and most of us have been practicing for a long time). I think it's important to cultivate additional ways of being that are geared toward virtual spaces.  This doesn't mean that F2F is bad, but it also doesn't mean that F2F is the only way.