Category Archives: educational futures

My vision of the future of education: Online schools

community of practice, educational futures, higher ed, MAOT
A photo taken from behind of a young woman looking at a person speaking on a laptop screen.
An illustration of online schools. Photo by Giovanni Gagliardi on Unsplash

Kathy Chandler, MAOT Lecturer in Online Teaching, writes:

My vision of the future starts in the recent past. Online distance education has been my area of work for many years. Online teaching was of little interest to most educators until 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, and suddenly the screen became the portal through which every teacher and every learner had to operate. There was a huge surge of interest in my research into online tuition. My little-read journal article published in 2016 about using breakout rooms suddenly became a seminal work. All educators wanted to know how to teach effectively online.

For higher education, even after the pandemic ended, online alternatives became the new normal. Students now value flexible and blended options and universities are making these options available. There is still more work to do to ensure that online learning is accessible, inclusive, engaging, and fun but more and more educators are developing the necessary skills.

But what about students in schools? Schoolteachers also developed many skills in online and blended working during the pandemic, but once the lockdowns ended, UK policy makers insisted on a return to ‘normal’. For many, this has been impossible. There has been a huge rise in the numbers of children and young people struggling with mental health issues. When school becomes a place where children and young people feel even more sad or anxious, online education is a very attractive option.

Many schoolteachers have also found benefits in moving online and the number of private companies offering online schooling is growing apace. A browse of their websites and policies shows that quality varies markedly. I suspect there is a big difference between how it feels to be a child required to keep their camera and microphone on constantly from day one and being in an environment where this is something to build up to gradually as confidence grows. This year the Department for Education identified a need for this space to be regulated and established the online education accreditation scheme (OEAS).

Those typically attending online schools include young celebrities needing flexible timetables, children with parents whose well-paid work requires frequent travel and those in other countries whose parents can afford a private British education. They also include children in poor health, those who have been bullied or excluded and those with special educational needs that have not been met elsewhere. For many families, finding the school fees is impossible but there are currently no plans to provide online state schools in the UK as there are in some parts of Australia for those who need them, for example.

My hope for the future of education is that every learner, regardless of age, will have the option of an online or blended education, which will be available at no extra cost and that their experience of learning is accessible, inclusive, engaging, and fun.

What could our educational future look like? A visual dialogue between Carmel Kent and Dall-e.

AI, educational futures, MAOT

Carmel Kent had a dream. A dream about the future of education. She then encountered Dall-e, an AI tool that generates digital images from natural language descriptions. This is the result of Carmel’s ‘conversation’ with Dall-e. We would welcome any further contributions to the blog on this theme, long or short, illustrated or not – what do you think our educational future could look like? 

Like any one of us, I dream a lot (on all levels of consciousness) about how learning would or could look in my community, country, university or globally. I am often very anxious about it. However, I sometimes get so hopeful that I can barely keep myself from jumping excitedly or just mumbling all over the place. I guess as long as I keep on imagining – I keep on learning and vice versa.

For this exercise, I needed a partner to bounce some balls with; it would be even better if this partner could do something I am not very able at – such as create some visuals. So, I found Dall-e. As it turns out, she was even available exactly when I wanted to chat. She was quite patient with my indecisive thoughts and my constant and iterative search for appropriate words. So, we had this back-and-forth: me telling her what I see, she responding with how she sees what I just shared with her, me thinking of new themes coming from her responses, and so it went.

Here is a synopsis of our dialogue:

At first, I was consumed with worry about the climate crisis. I kept imagining us, humans trying to figure us what went wrong at the very last minute:

A Dall-e image showing a group of people kneeling and praying in front of a forest aflame.

Even when I took us humans inside, trying to learn about our world from an imaginative, safe technology-oriented shelter, it still looked quite depressing:

A Dall-e image of three people sitting indoors looking at a laptop screen, while a dark and bleak landscape is viewed through the large window.

I then turned to more optimistic scenarios:

What if we do become kinder to our surroundings?

What if we also become kinder to children and young people?

What if we stop imposing certain types of knowledge and ways of knowing on them, and let them explore their own ways of learning while experimenting with what works for them and keeping them curious about themselves?

A Dall-e image showing a brightly coloured child-like drawing of a house with interconnected outside rooms and people interacting with one another in various spaces, all surrounded by vegetation.

Nice, don’t you think?

I then asked Dall-e what if it’s not just children? How would it look if people, no matter how old, could get out of schools and institutions and get together in learning communities, bringing their life, families and experiences into whatever new paths they want to explore? Yes, at this point, I became a bit ‘light-headed’, I guess. But she was still there with me:

A Dall-e image showing a group of people sitting cross-legged on grass in front of a row of houses, all reading from books, papers or laptops.

I was in the flow … maybe … just maybe … ‘learning’ or ‘education’ will not be associated necessarily with fixed qualifications, with marginalising people who cannot follow those fixed paths, or with following the artificial processes that give us the illusion of progress (e.g., you’re graduate year 2, you will now start year 3)?

Could learning become an activity associated with sensory life around the clock? with different people, different cultures and geographies? As Papert said when asked what he would change about education now that we have technology available to us:

“Do away with curriculum. Do away with segregation by age. And do away with the idea that there should be uniformity of all schools and of what people learn”.

A Dall-e image showing a group of people gardening in a communal garden in front of a row of houses.

I must say, Dall-e and I started connecting at this point. I felt we are getting somewhere. I loved how she kept the characters in her drawing a bit blurry, leaving me some space to guess what they were up to… were they building something? Growing new vegetables? Immersed in a discussion? Taking an online course? Reading a book? Daydreaming like she and I were?

A Dall-e image showing a group of people relaxing, reading, and playing games while others in the background tend a large garden.

I loved how the objects in her drawings didn’t always look like something I could quickly identify from my life. Perhaps those people are innovating? Maybe they are creating a world so different from what I imagined when Dall-e and I started chatting.

I guess that’s the beauty of collaborative learning: you can only know how it starts…