Chapter 7 The Coronavirus Online Pivot

Throughout this book, I have made occasional reference to the online pivot that occurred in the wake of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Universities, colleges, and schools were all closed for face-to-face teaching to reduce the risk of infection. In May 2020, UNESCO reported that over 85% of the world’s student population, some 1.4 billion learners from 188 countries, were affected by the closure of educational institutions at all levels in response to the pandemic. The only alternative for many institutions was to deliver some form of education online, and this sudden switch became known as the pivot online (or online pivot). In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic lockdown, this was often realized by conducting synchronous sessions, lectures, and classes online using a tool such as Zoom. However, this quick solution is unlikely to be sustainable in the long term, and with universities now offering a range of provisions—from fully online to blended to on-campus learning with enforced social distancing—more sophisticated and structured use of online learning will be required.

The pandemic and the subsequent online pivot have revealed many existing attitudes to online learning and considerable ignorance of existing practices. In the longer term, the pandemic will make many HEIs review the overall robustness of their offerings and seek to move portions online as a possible response to any future crisis. This has caused considerable consternation among many in senior positions in universities. Often they have spent their careers advocating the superiority of the campus experience over distance and online versions of learning and thus have a lot of personal capacity invested in this view and many construction projects based upon it. Shifting learning online, partially or wholly, is not a problem that they wish to have.

In addition, the time frames were short and the financial pressures considerable. Interest increased among external providers to solve the problem for universities. This might be effective in the short term, but in the longer term any effective solution will require staff development and establishment of new forms of support for students. This precarious relationship among universities, vendors, and learners is explored in the first of the metaphors in this chapter.

One of the biggest impacts of the pandemic on higher education is likely to be financial. The pandemic has revealed the fragility of the finances in the sector—over expenditure on campus buildings, reliance on the fees from international students, vital support staff and academics on precarious employment contracts, the impact of expensive student fees in countries such as the United Kingdom, and so on. It can be difficult to predict the long-term impacts of these issues. For example, after the banking crisis of 2008, there were many predictions about what changes would result, but the real long-term impacts were often secondary ones. The rise of populist leaders and causes such as Donald Trump and Brexit can be seen as a result of the long tail of the banking crisis, which led to austerity, which in turn caused unemployment and resentment among the white working class that could be exploited by xenophobes and nationalists. Such secondary effects are more difficult to predict, but one likely consequence in higher education is that HEIs will seek to make themselves and their models more robust to withstand any such impacts.

From an ed tech perspective, Tony Bates (2020) predicts an increase in the adoption of online learning but suggests that predictions that every institution will go online permanently are overblown. Some might switch to a predominantly online model, with a levelling out of about 25% of institutions offering fully online learning. Bates suggests that in the next five years far more, about 70%, will offer a blended or hybrid model, mixing online and face-to-face learning more effectively than now. Having made investments in ed tech, gained some of the benefits of a distributed model, and now keen to build in resilience against further crises, HEIs will offer a mixture of online and campus learning as the norm.

Jaws and the Online Pivot

Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film Jaws is divided into two clear acts. The first act takes place on the island of Amity, gearing up for its summer boom of the 4th of July. The central character, Chief Brody, wants to close the beaches because people are being eaten by a shark, and he rightly assumes this to be undesirable. His nemesis is the town’s mayor, Vaughn, who wants to keep the beaches open because of the impact that closure will have on the local economy. There are some immediate parallels here in the pandemic, with Trump in the United States and Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom initially wanting to keep businesses open. In higher ed terms, there is also a more stylistic analogy with this first act (although I will focus on the second act). In the first act, Amity Island is presented as idyllic, all bright sunshine and white picket fences. The shark lurks out there in the deep, the dark, the unknown. This might be how some in higher ed have been operating too: the pandemic (the shark in this analogy, obviously) has brought into focus many issues that have been hitherto ignored or downplayed. The reliance on income from overseas students by many universities is akin to Amity’s reliance on summer dollars. There are frailties everywhere in Amity that the shark’s presence exposes: minor corruption, class conflict, incompetence, distrust of outsiders, and precarious employment. You can map most of them onto higher ed also, for the weaknesses in a fragile system have been exposed.

After the body count rises, the mayor is forced to face the inevitable consequences. The first act ends with Brody hiring fisherman Quint, accompanied by shark expert Hooper, to kill the shark. Despite desires to carry on, higher ed reached a similar switch in the mood and tone of its narrative when the online pivot began. It went through the “beaches will be open on the 4th of July” phase, when officials in higher ed thought that it could carry on business as usual. This mentality reappeared among some officials when the new academic year started in September 2020, with many universities operating on campus only to shut down shortly after as cases of coronavirus soared. University campuses are a perfect environment for viruses to spread, combining communal living, multiple intersecting social networks, and people in proximity to each other (Paltiel et al., 2020). As Kernohan (2020) points out, with students travelling from all over the country, this presents a problem of viral spread beyond the campus. In Jaws, Hooper declares that a shark “is attracted to the exact kind of splashing and activity that occurs whenever human beings go in swimming. You cannot avoid it.” This is not true, by the way, for sharks actively tend to avoid people (McKeever, 2019), but for our analogy it is akin to how coronavirus is spread by exactly the actions of campus students: it is unavoidable. Hooper suggests that there are only two ways to defeat the shark: “You either gonna kill this animal or you’re gonna cut off its food supply.” Until uptake of the vaccines became sufficiently widespread, the only option to control the virus was, metaphorically, to take away its food supply.

The second act of Jaws focuses solely on the Orca boat and the three main protagonists. For this part of the analogy to work, it is important to accept that Jaws is not really a movie about a shark. It is, in one reading, a movie about three aspects of humanity (or specifically masculinity). There are many different interpretations of the movie, such as a patriarchal myth, with men killing the symbolic female (Caputi, 2010), a critique of capitalism (Frentz & Rushing, 1993), or angst about the atomic bomb (Rubey, 1976). A further perspective is that in the movie women and people of colour are excluded, but that would require a dedicated interpretation to do it justice. As we saw in the hunter-gatherer section, marginalized groups often bear the brunt of the impact, perhaps both of the shark and of the pandemic. In fact, this variety of interpretations is the film’s, or more specifically the shark’s, contribution to society: “None of these readings can be said to be wrong or aberrant, but their very multiplicity suggests that the vocation of the symbol—the killer shark—lies less in any single message or meaning than in its very capacity to absorb and organize all of these quite distinct anxieties together” (Jameson, 1979, p. 142).

In the more straightforward interpretation of three aspects of masculinity, each core aspect of socialized masculinity is represented by one of the main characters: Brody is the family, domesticated man; Hooper, the intellectual man; Quint, the macho man. Bailey (2020) sums it up by saying that the “three protagonists fall on distinctive points in the masculinity continuum.” A Freudian analysis might interpret them as ego, super-ego, and id, respectively. The three are in competition on the boat, and ultimately only two can emerge from their confrontation. They form a triangle, essentially, with each element in tension with the other but just maintaining a stable pact.

When the shark comes along, this fragile balance collapses. As anyone who has balanced cards to make a triangle will know, a collapsed line with two points is more stable, and it will revert to this with the slightest disruption. What has this to do with the online pivot and ed tech? In our analogy, Brody represents learners—we want to do right by them. Hooper, the intellectual, represents the academy and educators. This leaves the self-proclaimed man of reality, Quint, who represents ed tech vendors and content vendors. Prior to the arrival of the “shark,” they co-exist, if uncomfortably, like the three characters, but this is fragile. With the arrival of the “shark,” only two can survive ultimately. It can be any two but not all three.

We can view educators and ed tech vendors in a financially beneficial relationship that sees learners essentially as customers with wallets. Post-pandemic there will be a move to seek vendors to create online courses, and universities will do so to ensure their income streams, particularly from overseas students. HolonIQ (2021) reported a significant rise in the number of universities signing partnerships with commercial content providers in the first half of 2021, beyond expectations, which suggests that this was a reaction to the online pivot. Alternatively, after the pandemic, the lack of agility in universities and their frail finances might see some collapse, and consequently learners will turn to commercial providers. In this scenario, vendors and learners engage in a deprofessionalized, unbundled education market. The same HolonIQ report also highlighted the commercial acquisition and investment of learner platforms such as EdX, FutureLearn, and Coursera, suggesting that many commercial players now see an unbundled online learning market as a wise investment. The third scenario (and the one that plays out in Jaws with Hooper and Brody surviving) is that educators and learners exist in a higher education system that, after the pandemic, will be based upon education as a social and public good. The “shark” will not let all three emerge from the crisis, and now we get to decide which pair it is.

Of course, none of this is actually inevitable, and you can do your own analogy with any film that you choose, in which vendors, educators, and learners all co-exist for mutual benefit. But in this scenario, only two get to paddle back to shore. Jaws 2 gives us the perfect tagline for 2021 also: “Just when you thought it was safe to go back to campus. . . .”

The Internet Design and Robustness of Education

The pandemic has brought into sharp focus several structural weaknesses in the higher education system. They included the proximity of many people in one centralized location, which as highlighted in the previous section created a perfect culture for a virus to spread, and when that location was closed it was difficult for many of the functions of education to continue. The reliance on the lecture as the only model of delivery meant that other options were not readily available. The use of high-stakes examinations that required many individuals to be physically co-located at a specified time allowed no room for disruption, resulting in difficulty assessing students. In summary, the function of higher education was too closely allied with its physical instantiation. Once the buildings closed, the activities associated with them had no reliable means of continuation. Through the heroic efforts of many involved in education, including educational technologists, those activities did find a way to continue via the online pivot, but this is not a sustainable model. Although the crisis came in the form of the COVID-19 virus, there are other forms that it could have taken: climate change, increasing political unrest, different pandemics, and so on. COVID-19 made it apparent that the model of higher education largely adopted across the globe was not sufficiently robust.

If we want to design a more robust system, then there are plenty of metaphors from which to choose, and we will look at the idea of ecological resilience in the next section. One such model is from a system designed from the outset to be robust: namely, the internet. Paul Baran, the architect of the original design, proposed a communication system to the military that would be robust in the event of a nuclear attack. Naughton (1999, p. 97) states that Baran used three design principles: “One, avoid centralisation like the plague—because any centralized system can be disabled by a single well aimed strike; two, build a distributed network of nodes, each connected to its neighbours; and three, build in a significant amount of redundancy in the interconnections.”

Building upon Baran’s decentralized model, the internet was designed to connect different computing networks without them all having to conform to one technology. Leiner et al. (1997) gathered the recollections of many of those involved in the origins of the internet. They stressed that “the Internet as we now know it embodies a key underlying technical idea, namely that of open architecture networking. In this approach, the choice of any individual network technology was not dictated by a particular network architecture but rather could be selected freely by a provider and made to interwork with the other networks through a meta-level ‘Internetworking Architecture.’”

Leiner et al.’s account continued on to explain that Robert Kahn, who developed the early internet model, the ARPANET, worked from four design principles.

Each distinct network would have to stand on its own, and no internal changes would be required to any such network to connect it to the internet.
Communications would be on a best effort basis. If a packet didn’t make it to the final destination, then it would be retransmitted soon from the source.
Black boxes would be used to connect the networks; they would later be called gateways and routers. There would be no information retained by the gateways about the individual flows of packets passing through them, thereby keeping them simple and avoiding complicated adaptation and recovery from various failure modes.
There would be no global control at the operations level.

With a decentralized system, according to Baran’s design, this meant that there needed to be many different connections, with no single node being more important than any other. This was realized through the network of internet routers; if one was damaged, then information could find an alternative route to its destination. An open system then followed from the decentralized approach; if the system was to have no central control, then it needed to be open so that any compatible computer and network could hook onto it and allow communication to continue.

Abstracting from these fundamentals of the internet, three core principles for robust design can be proposed for our analogy. A robust system should be

open so that any appropriate contributor can join it;
decentralized and thus not reliant on one central node or location; and
distributed so that functions work throughout the network.

Turning now to education, perhaps the online pivot can be considered better as a pivot to distance education in some form in that it is focused on delivery and support to students remote from campus (or even if they are living on campus and studying from their rooms). Online delivery is how this will be realized, but distance from the physical campus, lecture hall, and exam centre is the key factor. During the pandemic, many existing distance education institutions and their students have been able to operate largely as normal. There has been disruption to some central services, such as postage and support teams, and a large-scale effect on the lives of the students living through the pandemic, but in terms of providing education it has been as near to business as normal as could be envisaged, compared with the disruption encountered by students on face-to-face campuses. Although not an ideal model, comparison of distance education to the internet can inform further consideration in making higher education as a whole more robust.

It is distributed: students are not required to go to a central location, instead studying at home or any location of their choosing, thus making it more robust if the central location, or gathering, is compromised. It is also distributed temporally in that much of the study is conducted asynchronously. Often the distance education approach does not rely on scheduled meetings, lectures, laboratories, or seminars at specific times. This asynchronous approach allows a much greater degree of flexibility, and therefore robustness, when things become disrupted. Just as internet data packets can take different routes to their destinations, so too students can accommodate different time allocations for their studies. Distribution can also apply within the process itself, for example with assessment. By distributing assessment tasks throughout a course—using regular assignments, eportfolio tasks, self-assessments, and end-of-course projects—the assessment becomes more robust than the emphasis on a single exam. Arguably, it also becomes more pedagogically sound and relevant for students, but the focus here is on robustness.
It is (largely) decentralized: just as students are distributed, so too the support of those students can be decentralized. This is not completely the case, for many distance education universities, such as the UKOU, have a central campus where most academic, administrative, and research staff are located. There are often smaller centres regionally, with many staff already home based or accustomed to working from home. Student support is provided by part-time tutors based all over the country and largely working from home. Thus, much of the functionality required to support students and maintain the educational purpose of the university is not placed in one central unit. In addition, modules are designed by teams and delivered through a structure rather than being reliant on one individual lecturer. Thus, it is not as reliant on any one individual for specific content as the lecture model.
It is open: this is not necessarily a defining factor of distance education, but many providers operate an open entry policy by which students do not need to meet entry requirements from schools and colleges. The system is thus less subject to disruptions to entry procedures, for example exams and assessments in schools. Openness also plays a wider role in the use of open content and open access journals. For instance, the UKOU’s OpenLearn site, which shares educational content under a Creative Commons licence, saw daily visits increase from 40,000 to over 200,000 during the pandemic (OpenLearn, 2020). This was a combination of educators wanting to learn how to deliver courses online and find material that they could repurpose and learners wanting to use time productively. Open access journals, which allow everyone to access their contents, also provide a more robust means of accessing educational content when the physical library is closed. The online pivot has seen the need for many students to access ebooks from their libraries since they could not access the physical copies. This demand has led to dramatic increases in prices from publishers to libraries for ebooks (in some cases 200%), already priced heavily for library use and with limited user licences. This has led to a campaign to investigate pricing by publishers in the United Kingdom (Hotten, 2020). Open textbooks provide a solution to vulnerability to such practices.

Distance education is also already largely online. It might not be wholly delivered this way, but there is usually an IT infrastructure, including VLE, support systems, content production, and communication tools accustomed to handling the requirements of students. As long as internet access is reliable, distance education itself is based upon a system designed to be robust. For instance, although the physical library buildings of many distance education universities might have closed during the pandemic, much of what those libraries do is already online in serving students, so the impact has been less than that of a campus library.

It is worth stressing that distance education was not designed with such robustness in mind; the usual aim was to develop an education system that would include those otherwise excluded. So, it is worth examining where weak points exist in this system also, with the goal of identifying a model for higher education more broadly.

Following are some potential risks and weaknesses of the distance education model as it is commonly realized.

A student’s home situation: the setup for students is varied. Many will have a home study arrangement in place, but some will use work-based access to computers, and if they are sent home they might lose that access.
Home disruption: related to the above, the normal home situation will be subject to considerable disruption during a pandemic when a partner, parent, or children might also now be at home full time and require care and support.
Internet access: the quality of home internet access can vary greatly geographically, and the costs of this provision can be shifted to students. Also, home access can deteriorate when everyone works at home and the demand increases.
Central staff disruption: although many academic staff might have appropriate equipment and be used to working at home, many central administrative staff might not have laptops, and their work is not as easily translated online.
Support staff: although much support work is decentralized, sometimes there are dedicated teams in physical call centres who will be affected if they need to work from home.

It is not my contention here that all higher education providers become distance education institutions; rather, the preceding analysis highlights how there are elements of robustness in the distance education model that can be modified and adapted for higher education. Ensuring more robust and reliable provision at a structural level, such that continued operation does not rely on excessive workloads for and strain on those working in higher education, seems to be one of the lessons of the online pivot.

Digital Resilience

In the previous section, I considered the idea of increasing the robustness of higher education using the design of the internet as a model. Another way to approach this in terms of metaphors is to consider the concept of resilience. The term “resilience” has been co-opted for rather dubious purposes recently. It is often closely allied with another term, “grit,” that has gained prominence. Made popular by Angela Duckworth, grit is defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals” (Duckworth et al., 2007) and suggested as the key to being successful compared with many other traits, such as IQ. However, the term places the emphasis on the individual, excusing many of the social and structural problems that can contribute to a lack of success. The simplified version is that those in poverty just lacked sufficient “grit.” In an analysis of the term, Ris (2015, p. 2) says that, “to its skeptics, grit is at best an empty buzzword, at worst a Social Darwinist explanation for why poor communities remain poor—one that blames the victims of entrenched poverty, racism, or inferior schooling for character flaws that caused their own disadvantage.” Resilience is often allied with grit, as the ability to persevere through hardship and recover from setback, and has been suggested as having a positive link to mental health (Epstein & Krasner, 2013). As with grit, though, similar overtones of social Darwinism arise along with a shift of blame from society to individual.

However, before it was inveigled into such dubious usage, resilience was a useful metaphor, borrowed from ecology, and that is the interpretation that I revisit here. Referring to the stability of ecological systems, Holling (1973, p. 14) defined resilience as “a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables.”

This is a much more nuanced and complex concept than grit or simply the ability to recover from setbacks. Hopkins (2009) developed Holling’s (1973) definition beyond ecology as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change, so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks.” This definition emphasizes a system’s overall ability to retain its function and identity, and this is relevant to our consideration of higher education post-pandemic. Consider an academic journal, which might have started as a print-based artifact, with set issues per year. Then it shifted to a combination of online and print before finally becoming online only. The editors then might have moved to a continuous publication model without set issues. They might also have made the decision to accept different forms of submissions, such as video articles. However, if the journal has retained its general aim, met the needs of the same audience, and maintained academic standards, then we would still consider it to be the same journal, but one that has changed over time, usually in response to the changing environment and perhaps the personnel on the editorial board. It has retained its core identity and as such demonstrated resilience.

Similarly, we can view the online pivot as a significant further shift to a digital system. We can think of digital resilience as a university’s ability to continue its normal operations through digital means. In the previous section, I suggested that there was an over-reliance on the physical structures of universities and their functions, whereas digital resilience allows for these functions to be realized irrespective of the physical setup.

Resilience is a concept that has been applied beyond ecosystems, finding particular relevance to sustainable development and climate change (e.g., Hopkins, 2009). It has also been applied to education, and open education in particular, with Hall and Winn (2010) arguing that resilience “develops engagement, education, empowerment and encouragement. Resilient forms of HE should have the capacity to help students, staff and wider communities to develop these attributes. As technology offers reach, usability, accessibility and timely feedback, it is a key to developing a resilient higher education.” Walker et al. (2004) propose four aspects of resilience that form a useful means of approaching it as a metaphor.

Latitude is the maximum amount that a system can be changed before losing its ability to recover.
Resistance is the ease or difficulty of changing the system: that is, how resistant it is to being changed.
Precariousness is how close the current state of the system is to a limit or “threshold.”
Panarchy is the influences of external forces at scales above and below. For example, external oppressive politics, invasions, market shifts, or global climate change can trigger local surprises and regime shifts.

Often resilience is considered only from one of these perspectives, typically resistance. If a system is resistant to change, then it is seen as resilient. However, high resistance is not necessarily a benefit to an ecosystem, as Holling (1973) observed; for example, some insect populations fluctuate wildly depending on environmental factors but over time prove to be resilient because they have high latitude. Resilience, then, suggests adaptation to and evolution in new environmental conditions, with an emphasis on retaining the core identity of a system. In ecology, identity means that the species persists, although it might be adapted, whereas in organizational terms it means that the core functions remain, although they might be realized in newer, modified ways.

With reference to the online pivot and educational technology, resilience can be seen as utilizing technology to continue the underlying function of the institution. Although resilience can be seen at the individual level, it comes with the reservations mentioned previously, and it is perhaps best applied to the institutional level. The institution can be seen as a complex ecosystem in itself, composed of a number of individuals, behaviours, tasks, and functions.

Terry Anderson and I (Weller and Anderson, 2013) proposed adapting the four aspects of resilience (Walker et al., 2004), and for any factor of change facing a university, scoring each of them a subjective ranking of 1 to 10 (1 = low resilience, 10 = high resilience). A combined high score of more than 35 would indicate that it is a challenge for which the institution was exceptionally well adapted already, whereas a low score of less than 15 would indicate that the institution faces a considerable threat from this challenge, with which it is not well equipped to deal. We used the challenges of open access publishing and MOOCs to demonstrate the model.

However, it could also be an effective model for considering how an HEI, or higher education in general, can cope with a pandemic. Consider, for example, your own institution if you are at one. How would it score in terms of conducting the online pivot?

Latitude: can the institution change how it teaches and still operate?
Resistance: is there a history of adapting to change? How willing and able are staff to change how they teach and operate?
Precariousness: what is the current state of finances, resources, and staffing?
Panarchy: the virus is a panarchic effect in itself, but it brings with it many others, such as research funding, political shifts, changes to travel, et cetera. Different institutions will have different susceptibilities here; for example, those reliant on conferences to generate income will be affected by reductions in travel.

This exercise can then be applied to any of the longer-term post-COVID-19 scenarios. For example, versions could be used to consider continued waves of the pandemic, a serious outbreak on campus, the loss of international students, a reduction in student numbers, and so on. As a strategic exercise, this framework is worth using to indicate how ready an institution is to cope with the pandemic and where its weaknesses lie. I have found it useful to frame workshops since it will bring to the surface different perspectives from participants; whereas some will view the institution as well prepared, others will think that it is in a precarious position. Using this method can be a route to acquiring information from different components of a complex system; for example, the library might seem to be well prepared but the physical estates team under-resourced. This can then be used to identify priorities to increase the institution’s overall resilience to any given scenario.

The method can also be applied to the higher education system itself, for example at a national or regional level, and it can be a tool to help set priorities and policies. Developing a more resilient system of higher education, rather than passing the burden on to individuals to develop their own resilience, is a more sustainable model. In this interpretation, I believe, resilience still has a lot to offer as a metaphor.

Chapter 8. Pedagogy