Online education and the digital divide

The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted education around the world to distance and online modes, with lots of wonderful breakthroughs, disruptions and leaps in technology and pedagogy alike. It was wonderful to try out many of these technologies and reflect about the changes required in pedagogical approaches to make online education more effective.

Also on this blog, I have been focusing a lot on the technologies and how to deal with them, and to a somewhat lesser extent on the education literature and what I’ve picked up on the way. But the more we discussed in our group the more this problem became crystallised: how are we to reach out to, and support the people who do not have access to such technologies? Back in 2013 when digitalisation became a buzzword even in the humanitarian sector, IFRC’s World Disaster Report focused on digitalisation endeavours and the “digital divide“. There are many aspects to this, from communication with people who don’t have the tech, to questions of inclusion, to the extreme point of “listening to the silence” in needs assessment. After all, the one area with an information blackout may be the one most affected by a disaster or conflict, whether that’s an island or region where a typhoon has cut off telecom, or a conflict zone where the warring parties have done the same. As in public health, it is rarely the ones shouting the loudest who are the most urgent to attend. On the converse, the most fascinating bit about the digital divide are also its unsung heroes, from mobile money to humanitarian IDs.

Education is no stranger to the digital divide. The question is not (only) about the haves vs have-nots of certain types of technology but one of social inclusion in technology-enabled environments (Warschauer, 2004), or in Gorski’s (2005) terms, assuring education equity.

While we were discussing cognitive, social, teacher to emotional presence, we often quickly reverted to whether to keep your cameras on or off in a zoom class. (This blog sums it up rather well.) At the same time, we all faced various facets of the digital divide: students who stayed in their home countries instead of coming to the site of education and did not have the same access to the web as we would presume; students who may have smartphones to laptops but not steady electricity supplies; to just students whose living conditions wouldn’t allow them to have full audio and video-enabled sessions in parallel to the activities of the rest of the family in a lock-down. So what would social inclusion and education equity mean here?

On the good side, online education can facilitate access to education and encouragement to those who would otherwise not have that access (Gorski, 2005). On the reverse, it can accentuate minority, and gender gaps in feeling included, feeling (cyber-)safe, or even seeking such education. Fast forward to 2016, Cruz-Jesus et al. (2016) found that in the EU, education was a driver of technological inclusion and ICT adoption in a household, and thereby an enabler of people in the EU being able to use online platforms in a range of services from paying their taxes to healthcare. But overall, the more educated people were the more likely they were using online platforms, which in itself can become a virtuous cycle for the selected few.

To overcome this privilege in a time where lockdowns have forced education to go online, inclusion in education has also become a question of digital inclusion. Martens et al. (2020) list what ICT inclusion in education means and how to go about it: from promotion of ICT in education to providing computers in public spaces (provided these are open) or to learners for free, to promoting the use of free software. Even they were then faced with the overriding basics: electricity shortages hampering access, the lack of computer literacy of educators becoming the bottleneck in adoption. The technical hickups aside – and much can be done if one starts with using the technology students already use – at the end, it is people helping people to overcome the knowledge-related aspects of the digital divide (Watts, 2020).

---

Cruz-Jesus, F., Vicente, M.R., Bacao, F. and Oliveira, T., 2016. The education-related digital divide: An analysis for the EU-28. Computers in Human Behavior, 56, pp.72-82.

Gorski, P., 2005. Education equity and the digital divide. AACE Journal, 13(1), pp.3-45.

Martens, M., Hajibayova, L., Campana, K., Rinnert, G.C., Caniglia, J., Bakori, I.G., Kamiyama, T., Mohammed, L.A., Mupinga, D.M. and Oh, O.J., 2020. “Being on the wrong side of the digital divide”: seeking technological interventions for education in Northeast Nigeria. Aslib Journal of Information Management.

Warschauer, M., 2004. Technology and social inclusion: Rethinking the digital divide. MIT press.

Watts, G., 2020. COVID-19 and the digital divide in the UK. The Lancet Digital Health, 2(8), pp.e395-e396.

Ghost member

Now that I am not able to attend any of the synchronous meetings of my group it feels like being a ghost group member. So I started to wonder whether this ghost-like feeling extends to online education overall.

From an instructor perspective there is a long-standing discussion on how an online instructor comes across, as a sage, guide, or ghost. According to Mazzolini and Maddison (2003), e.g. instructors who post more frequently in online education are perceived as “more enthusiastic”, for example. Yet, more frequent postings by instructors do not necessarily result in greater student participation rates; and very frequent postings by instructors even result in lower numbers of postings by students once the instructor starts to dominate the discussion. Perhaps more importantly, they also found that the type of posting (i.e. not answering questions as a “sage” but encouraging the discussion itself as a “guide”) made a difference in engaging learners. Something to remember for our MOOCs for sure; and MOOCs are in fact the topic of our group work 🙂

[As a side note, our humanitarian logistics MOOC has been updated also with new topics and is up and running again! Check it out at https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/humanitarian-logistics and join the 2260 other people from 124 countries who are currently enrolled in it.]

From the student perspective, “ghosts” in online education refer to “ghost accounts” for the purposes of cheating (Hollis, 2018). Not quite the feeling I have here 🙂 Rather, what I was wondering about is whether you would start feeling like a ghost yourself if contributing week after week to the documents your group writes, and watching their recorded interactions, while not actually being able to participate in those synchronous meetings. There are quite a lot of studies on how using additional synchronous media incl. messaging apps would improve the engagement of learners in online education, but right now it is in fact exactly the aspect of not being able to participate in the synchronous bits that makes me feel almost left out. It makes me wonder whether there is any study on this situation in light of course drop-out rates; and if there is any such relationship, how we can overcome it and keep people engaged after all.

---

Hollis, L. P. (2018). Ghost‐students and the new wave of online cheating for community college students. New Directions for Community Colleges, 2018(183), 25-34.

Mazzolini, M., & Maddison, S. (2003). Sage, guide or ghost? The effect of instructor intervention on student participation in online discussion forums. Computers & Education, 40(3), 237-253.