The “Teaching in Blended Learning Environments” reading raises a highly relevant topic in today’s educational habitat. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many K12 and post-secondary institutions found themselves under severe lockdown restrictions for long stretches of time. These restrictions often drastically reduced class sizes and frequency, or even banning in-person teaching completely (Mishra et al., 2020). Educators scrambled to adopt online and distance learning technologies such as teleconferencing platforms (i.e., Zoom) to replace traditional pedagogical approaches (Mishra et al., 2020). Much of these decisions were made with the understanding that these technologies will be a temporary substitute, necessary only until such time that the pandemic has abated, and restrictions lifted (Mishra et al., 2020).

 

But now that the world is on the tail end of the pandemic, will everyone truly go back to formal, in-person classes? Whereas post-secondary schools often do contain some form of online instruction (recorded lectures, class discussion boards, online tutorials), K12 education in the West were still mostly taught in traditional, in-person, teacher-centric formats (Mishra et al., 2020). It is hard to envision transitioning back into the past entirely, especially when faced with the benefits of distance learning and the possibility of future COVID-19 outbreaks. The conceptual framework chapter of the “Teaching in Blended Learning Environments” reading provides many well-reasoned arguments for why a combined approach is best. I agree with many of the concepts of Lipman’s ‘communities of inquiry’, where higher level education is best realized as, “a collaborative and an individually constructivist learning experience (“Teaching in Blended Learning Environments”, n.d., p. 3). Indeed, we have seen that certain online learning activities not only offer students increased flexibility and the benefit of ‘anonymity’ (engaging teachers and classmates from behind a username), but also synergy with traditional lecture formats to enhance subject mastery. I would additionally argue that such a system could be extrapolated to high school students, where an emphasis on individual responsibility begins to represent a major component of the curriculum. Such blended learning environments would also make the education system more robust against future lockdowns.

 

Another topic regarding the rapid adoption of distance education technologies during the pandemic is safety and privacy. The age-old debate between modernization/accessibility and privacy/misuse has become a critical part of the discussion on blended learning environments and distance education. It is welcoming to see that policy makers across the spectrum place great care on the regulation of private data, even for educational purposes. Canada’s FIPPA act is a rather robust and comprehensive framework for the management of private information. I had an “a-ha!” moment and I was surprised to see that there is a list of social media sites/apps under Schedule 3 – Prescribed Social Media Sites (Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Regulation, 2021). I am curious to know if this list of sites is regularly updated with each amendment. Regan and Jesse (2018) also raise important issues in the education-information privacy debate, outlining multiple considerations that fall under a privacy umbrella. But I wonder if such rigorous scrutiny of third-party service providers (software, databasing, etc.) is perhaps hampering the effort to modernize education. Much of our private information, such as our age, gender, personal preferences, exact location, etc., is already accessible from our use of online platforms like Google Maps or Gmail (Shen et al., 2007). Rather than theoretical critiques, a comprehensive list of requirements that third-party companies must adhere to would be a more effective policy decision.

 

References

AU Press. (n.d.). Conceptual Framework. In Teaching in Blended Learning Environments (pp. 1–8). essay.

Mishra, L., Gupta, T., & Shree, A. (2020). Online teaching-learning in higher education DURING lockdown period of COVID-19 pandemic. International Journal of Educational Research Open, 1, 100012. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedro.2020.100012

Queen’s Printer, FREEDOM OF INFORMATION AND PROTECTION OF PRIVACY ACY1–8 (2021). Victoria, BC.

Regan, P. M., & Jesse, J. (2018). Ethical challenges of edtech, big data and PERSONALIZED learning: Twenty-first century STUDENT sorting and tracking. Ethics and Information Technology, 21(3), 167–179. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-018-9492-2

Shen, X., Tan, B., & Zhai, C. X. (2007). Privacy protection in personalized search. ACM SIGIR Forum, 41(1), 4–17. https://doi.org/10.1145/1273221.1273222