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).

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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.

Poor peer pressure

The more we were discussing about collaborative online learning, the more we came back to group formations setting the tone. Obviously, assignment structures and formations set the tone as well – esp. how clear and relevant they are (Brindley et al., 2009), but let’s keep it to the group for now.

How people learn in groups depends of course on how satisfied they are with them in the first place. This goes to the extent that groups that are formed by students not only give them more buy-in to the task, but students are more likely to pick up the slack of social loafers in those (Aggarwal and O’Brien, 2008). While this is great for getting the project done, I wonder, is that what we want people to learn? In other words, isn’t this rather poor peer pressure?

There are lots of pros and cons of letting students choose vs assigning them to groups, as we outline in length in our group report to this task. While social loafing may be an issue in all of sorts of groups, somehow, the very nature of leaving out people, deliberately or not, is just less likely to occur if facilitators assign group members. At the end of the day, what this task made me notice is that social loafing worries aside, what matters is that everyone is included in groups. How else can we also make sure that we learn from one another?

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Aggarwal, P. and O’Brien, C.L. (2008). Social loafing on group projects: Structural antecedents and effect on student satisfaction. Journal of Marketing Education, 30(3), pp.255-264.

Brindley, J. E., Blaschke, L. M., & Walti, C. (2009). Creating effective collaborative learning groups in an online environment. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 10(3), pp.1-18.

Educational tools, tools, tools on my mind

There are so many tools out there that all supposedly support education that it’s mind-blowing. There is seemingly even a mind-map of mind-mapping tools!

I was trying to learn about mind mapping when I came across this mind map of mind mapping software #meta pic.twitter.com/D6vPsKg1Ht

— Ravi S. Kudesia (@rskudesia) November 10, 2020

Fascinating!

There are way too many that one could account for, let alone keep up with. Throughout the ONL course we are experimenting with quite a few, and while that’s perhaps not the learning objective of the course, it’s a good experience to get to know them from the student perspective. A few quick take-aways:

• Many tools are platform-dependent. And we cannot take for granted that all our students have the same platform. (MS Teams works differently for Macs vs PCs, and whatever is the official info, that’s what students report.)
• Some tools are restricted to people from the same organisation. (Sway sounded like a great idea until it didn’t actually work for people from different organisations.)
• Some tools don’t work with other tools. Try using them through your favourite screening app, e.g. through Zoom, Teams, GoToMeeting etc. to see whether they are compatible.
• Most tools require individuals to create their tool-specific logins first. Quite a waste of time and effort to do during a class, but asynchronously tech support can be even more difficult.
• Others require one to have a credit card to begin with, even for the free version. Needless to say, we cannot assume all students can do that. (Interestingly, some tools, e.g. Prezi, requires that from some geographical regions but not others. How would you know what applies where?)
• …

Where am I going with this? A couple of things:

1. We don’t know which interface students encounter when signing up for a tool. It may differ from the facilitator’s interface.
2. We cannot presume students have the means or the platforms to get everything to work.

I.e. trying out things helps but only to some extent. Giving options could help; using only the tools that every student within a university, or across participating universities have access to restricts the possibilities somewhat but is a workaround. For MOOCs, it may come down to sticking to one and only platform throughout, without changing them for assignments, either.

This takes away quite a bit of the variety or creativity of the learning experience, though. => Any better suggestions?

The value of meetings

By now probably everyone understands what is meant by “zoom fatigue” (and how to combat it), yet taking a course has made me find some re-appreciation for synchronous, even virtual, meetings. It makes such a difference to be able to talk to one’s group and not just work on the same project! Peer pressure, group belonging, whatever you want to call it, it works.

Great to experience it from the student perspective, all the struggles are a blessing in disguise as they increase one’s understanding for what our own students go through.

P.S. Where else than in actual meetings would one get to hear about South Korea’s total silence when students take exams?

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.

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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.

Implement, or practice fist?

New versions of digital education platforms are coming out all the time, adding on to the features they’ve had, and changing where to find them. These are exciting features for sure but software and app updates have never been more challenging than when you discover them right in the middle of your next session. Now you can control for a feature, the next day you can’t, the following day it’s back on again but in a different place…

Which brings me to my question: do you practice the new features first, or do you jump in medias res with them? One of my colleagues commented that students may be up for the experiment if you just warn them first. Is it part of “learner engagement” that should yield interest and positive learning outcomes (see e.g. Montgomery et al., 2015), or does the struggle with the new feature sidetrack the learning from the content you actually want to convey?

It may be somewhat different when learners are asked to themselves produce the content in a different way and format, e.g. as blogs, vlogs etc. (Liu, 2016). What do you reckon?

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(Warning, just because you have an update, it doesn’t mean your audience has the latest version of the same app. They may not see what you see…)

Liu M-h (2016), “Blending a class video blog to optimize student learning outcomes in higher education”, The Internet and Higher Education, 30(2016): 44-53.

Montgomery AP, Hayward D, Dunn W, Carbonaro M & Amrhein C (2015), “Blending for student engagement: Lessons learned for MOOCs and beyond“, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 31(6).

Online guest lectures

Online education has its up- and downsides compared to regular face to face classes for sure. The main problem is of course with those courses that have not been designed a priori to be online but then had to move to a different platform, hybrid, or completely digital. So here’s an upside to the still hybrid, synchronous sort of online education:

• For once, it’s possible to have short guest lectures from industry without people having to take half a day off just for the travel.
• Plus, you can incorporate people from all around the world! Of course somewhat depending on time zones but it works much better than flying them in. (And it is a lot more ecological, too.)

Over the summer, we’ve managed to have the most fabulous guest speakers in a doctoral course, gurus one can only dream of incorporating. In addition, to break the rhythm, we’ve spiced up the course with so-called “gamechangers”, i.e. new topics with specific experts each.

Last week, I incorporated an entire industry panel in a course. Rather than having a single guest lecture, there were six. Okay, it’s partly because I had anticipated some to decline but all were instantly up for the task (thank you!). They all got the same questions in advance and presented their career path, the SCM challenges they’ve faced, COVID-19-specific current challenges, and gave some career advice to our students. Now that I can see students’ learning logs, the panel really worked. Here’s why:

• The panel represented completely different industries, supply chain members, and also job tasks in the supply chain yet there was a common theme with the questions that ran through it.
• People talked about their challenges as well as what excites them most in their work. They made it personal, and enthusiasm rubs off (König, 2020).
• Everyone was prepared and actually answered the questions, plus the last question made it very current – and relates back to the variety of our COVID-19-related research projects.
• The class had a completely different rhythm from other classes, which many students appreciated as a change.
• The panel was composed of alumni who clearly wanted to bring their experience back to our students. Exchange students also noted that it showcased our university’s strong community.

The last point could have been a problem had they been uniform, but the diversity of industries, people, and their surprisingly international careers made it work. Thanks to all of you who participated!

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König, L. (2020). Podcasts in higher education: teacher enthusiasm increases students’ excitement, interest, enjoyment, and learning motivation. Educational Studies, 1-4.

Public vs private modus operandi

The first FISh (focus-investigate-share) model being under way in our group it was interesting to see that so many agreed with the problem of public vs private personalities on social media; and even of the question which tool is a public vs a private one in teaching. It was stirred up by the question of digital literacies (as in this TED talk) and my note of the fact that few of us in this ONL course identify as online educators. Rather, at the university level, we are subject matter experts first. For more on the topic, have a look at this blog that dissects the issue further.

So far the best suggestion for keeping one’s personal sanity with this in mind, was to separate private from public accounts and platforms. What is your suggestion?

Panic buying and the beer game

Some countries are now in their second wave of panic buying due to the COVID-19 outbreak. First it was toilet paper (check here how much you own vs would need), then anything from garlic to baking powder to hair dye (really?), now we are back to toilet paper and dry foods. Here’s a rather funny note on that. It’s certainly an easy time to explain the Forrester effect aka bullwhip effect.

There is also the famous “beer game” that has been developed to illustrate the bullwhip effect. It’s great to experience in a playful way how even those who have read up on the effect still struggle when putting it in practice. (I’m a big fan of serious games, I have to admit; shout out here to Pablo Suarez who has introduced me to a few about climate change.)

But the beer game is developed for in-class interaction so how to do it online? There are two options I’ve found:

• The best one for groups of people, i.e. for online “in-class” interaction is Bob Jacob‘s version that can be played by many students simultaneously, and where you can set up your own class. This is the one we’ve played now in SCM; and while we usually play it in computer lab, this time students were anywhere online; you’ll find it at http://oscm-pro.com/beer/ with instructor’s manual, game description and anything you need. Just make sure everyone uses the same browser to begin with and is clear about their team and position in the supply chain.
• Then there is a newer one where you can play solo against an AI. It’s fancy and fun, but more for asynchronous learning, i.e. it serves a different purpose. See https://beergame.opexanalytics.com/#/

Which other games do you use in SCM education? Please share in the comments!

PS Shout-out also to the iTRACK team at TU Delft that developed Plaitra (which was used to illustrate collaboration but also tracking and tracing technology in disasters, and even for data collection on the topic, see Lukosch and Comes, 2019), and to Ari Mäntyvaara and all the students in our project course with whom we’ve developed FRC’s logistics game.

Lukosch H & Comes T (2019), “Gaming as a research method in humanitarian logistics”, Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Vol. 9 No. 3, pp. 352-370. https://doi.org/10.1108/JHLSCM-06-2018-0046

Digital natives (or not)

Let me start by saying that I am far from anything that the term “digital native” would encapsulate. Yet, rather than the dichotomy of those born with tech vs those who engaged with it later, today’s ONL webinar made it clear that we confuse ownership (of various gadgets) with the capability to use them. On the other hand, many digital natives may be tech savvy in terms of using the tech, but could they really code, or repair it?

We were thus rather introduced to a handy 2×2 (aren’t all handy analysis matrices 2x2s?) that put our usage of various platforms into perspective, focusing on the motivation to engage with the tech; with dimensions between visitor and resident; vs personal and institutional use. Funnily enough, each one of us may use the very same platform differently, i.e. the matrix is personal use-, not platform-dependent. Shout-out to my colleagues in marketing who keep on talking about “value-in-use” 🙂

The mapping exercise was kind of fun. Admittedly, I had just done something very similar in my SCM course two weeks ago, asking students to draw their supply chain in a (hold it!) “supply chain mapping” session. Some tips for those of you doing similar things on Teams:
– Make sure students are not just on their phones but have an actual laptop / PC to work with; if nobody in a group does, they won’t be able to initiate a call in the breakout channel, not to speak of the whiteboard.
– There are lots of apps linked to Teams, of course, but using the institutionally supported ones will mean your students can actually use what you suggest.

I couldn’t agree more with David White (whose blog I still need to check out further) on the note that just by seeing everyone doing something on the whiteboard, it gives learners as well as facilitators a shared sense of presence, and of doing things together.

Thanks to my PBL group’s first task leaders, I finally also learned how to record something on Teams without it being a teaching session 🙂