persuasive essay about online education during pandemic

Persuasive Essay Writing

Persuasive Essay About Online Education

Make Your Point: Tips and Examples for Writing a Persuasive Essay About Online Education

Published on: Jan 13, 2023

Last updated on: Oct 25, 2024

Examples of Persuasive Essays About Online Education

Students worldwide increasingly turn to online education to learn, earn degrees and certificates, and further their careers.

But how do you craft an effective persuasive essay that speaks to this issue?

Persuasive essays on topics like online education can be tricky since they require strongly framing your argument concisely yet compellingly.

To help make things easier, we've gathered examples of well-crafted persuasive essays about online education.

These examples are complete with all components — so you can get inspired and start writing your own!

Persuasive essay about online education during the pandemic

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Persuasive essay about an online class is better than face to face

Impact of online classes on students' essay

Persuasive essay about online education is the new normal

Persuasive essay about online courses

Examples of Persuasive Essay on Pros and Cons of Online Education

To get inspired, read through our examples of good persuasive essays on the advantages and disadvantages of online education!

You never know; one idea might jumpstart your entire paper.

Benefits of online education essay

Persuasive essay about online education advantages

Persuasive essay about online education disadvantages

Essay on pros and cons of online classes

Paper Due? Why Suffer? That's our Job!

For more inspiration, check out some more persuasive essay examples here!

Five Steps to Crafting an A+ Persuasive Essay

As a student, you know the feeling. You've been given a persuasive essay assignment and don't know where to start.

What do you do? Don't worry; we've got your back!

Here are five tips for writing an impressive persuasive essay that will earn you the grade you deserve. Let's get started!

1. Choose Your Topic Wisely

Choosing a topic that interests you and your audience can make all the difference in writing an effective persuasive essay.

If you are passionate about your topic and it matters to you, it will likely matter to your audience.

2. Do Your Research

Once you have chosen a topic, it's time to dig deeply into the research available on the subject matter.

From scholarly journals to newspaper articles, dive into the available information and uncover facts supporting your point of view.

Be sure to cite your sources properly so that other readers can find them too!

Check out this amazing video!

3. Create an Outline

Before diving headfirst into writing your essay, take some time to map out a clear outline of what points you plan to cover.

Making an outline is especially important when crafting persuasive essays as it will help guide readers smoothly.

4. Write With Passion

Remember that this isn't just another paper. You are trying to persuade someone with words!

Choose your language carefully; be strong yet respectful of opposing opinions. Make sure each sentence flows logically into the next. Use descriptive language that paints vivid pictures in readers' minds.

Finally, don't forget that passion should be evident throughout every word of your paper!

5. Edit & Proofread

Once your first draft is complete, take some time away from it before coming back with fresh eyes for editing.

Check for typos and mistakes while ensuring each sentence reads clearly and logically follows from the last one.

Learn to craft a perfect persuasive essay by reading our extensive guide on persuasive essays.

15 Persuasive Speech Topics About Online Classes

Here is a list of 15 engaging persuasive essay topics to inspire you. Let's have a look!

Why online classes are the most effective form of learning during a pandemic
The advantages and disadvantages of having online classes
How technology has made online education accessible to everyone
The cost-effectiveness of taking online classes compared to traditional college courses
Are online classes changing the way people think about education?
Is online learning as effective as in-person classes?
The importance of taking online classes to improve job opportunities
How online classes can benefit those who are unable to attend a physical classroom
What steps can be taken to make the transition from traditional to online classes easier?
What are the best practices for creating an effective online learning environment?
How to make sure students remain engaged in the online course material
The benefits of taking online classes for working professionals
Is online learning a better fit for certain types of learners?
Leveraging online classes to gain innovative skills and knowledge
Why are online classes the future of education?

Check our extensive list of top persuasive essay topics for more inspiration!

In the end, a persuasive essay is all about making your point convincingly. With the right evidence, logical reasoning, and engaging tone, you can make an argument for any topic you choose.

If you're still struggling to put your thoughts together or need help getting started, don't worry. Trust our professional essay writer with your next essay.

CollegeEssay.org offers the best online essay writing service that will take care of everything for you. We guarantee a high-quality persuasive essay writing service that will get you the grades you deserve. So what are you waiting for?

Frequently Asked Questions

What techniques can i use to write a persuasive essay about online education.

To write a persuasive essay, you should gather evidence and facts that support your points of view. Additionally, you can employ rhetorical techniques, presenting an ironclad argument and appealing to emotion or logic.

What elements should I include in my persuasive essay about online education?

Your persuasive essay should include a clear thesis statement that states your opinion and supporting evidence that backs up your argument.

You should also provide a counterargument to address potential objections from readers and discuss how you would refute them.

What is the thesis statement about online learning?

The thesis statement for an argumentative essay about online learning should state your position on the issue, explain why you believe it is valid, and provide evidence to back up your stance.

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Motivating Online Learning: The Challenges of COVID-19 and Beyond

Thomas k f chiu, tzung-jin lin, kirsti lonka.

Author information
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Copyright and License information

Corresponding author.

Issue date 2021.

This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic.

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly impacted students’ opportunities to learn worldwide. Students and teachers have been forced to shift from traditional classrooms to emergency online / remote learning. They face key challenges in adapting practices away from a focus on face-to-face learning to an online learning environment mediated by various forms of technology. The pandemic reveals the urgent need to augment the educational system’s technological infrastructure, expand the teachers’ pedagogical expertise and the students’ learning repertoire. Under the circumstances, researchers and practitioners should carefully reconsider the role of teachers, students, as well as the technological environment for online learning and put ongoing efforts to adequately address the underlying epistemological basis of education (Tsai et al. 2013 ). These emerging challenges have never been apparent during this critical period of time. Hence, it is urgent and crucial for researchers to reflect and improve the current practices of online learning and teaching through appropriate designs and evidence-based strategies for the time being.

Online learning also heavily relies on the students’ ability to make meaning through assuming agency in learning, initiating and sustaining meaningful multimodal communications, and developing conceptual and epistemic understanding through active engagement with digital resources (Hartnett, 2016 ). In such online contexts, the critical role of students’ self-regulation, motivation, and positive learning dispositions are accentuated (Chiu & Hew, 2018 ). Although a substantial number of studies have encompassed these relevant issues in the field of educational technology, research evidence on how to appropriately adapt pertinent learning and motivational theories to design effective and sustainable online pedagogy in a complex, multifaceted, and even situational online learning environments are still relatively under-investigated.

A broad range of motivational theories derived from motivation research such as self-determination theory (SDT) (Ryan & Deci, 2020 ), expectancy-value theory (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000 ), achievement goal theory (Senko et al. 2011 ), and control-value theory (Pekrun et al. 2017 ) have been widely applied to understand the contextual and psychological factors that optimize students’ learning and engagement. These relevant theories have been successfully applied to understand the underlying environmental and psychological factors that affect learners’ motivation, engagement, and learning. When pedagogical design adequately addresses these needs, students are actively motivated to engage in learning tasks.

However, the aggregated stress and anxiety from the pandemic may easily demotivate and disengage student learning as prior studies have highlighted that negative emotions may inhibit learning (Pekrun et al. 2017 ). Although applying various motivational theories to traditional face-to-face environments has proven to be a productive undertaking (e.g., Lazowski & Hulleman, 2016 ), little attention has been paid to how existing motivational theories can be adapted to understand how to optimize online learning or student engagement within technology infused learning contexts (Chiu, 2021 ; Hsu et al., 2019 ). This is a critical and urgent gap that cannot be ignored given the growing need for online learning in light of the pandemic. In addition, how student motivation can be build/leverage upon to sustain prolonged collaborative online meaning making is also an essential dimension that needs attention.

Given that the pandemic is evolving into a unique combination of public health crisis, social isolation, and economic recession that causes varying levels of anxiety and stress, we believe that the accepted papers would contribute new insights on how to leverage motivational theories to optimize online learning based on existing ongoing efforts and experiences gained from the pandemic. They also facilitate our discussions on how to rethink education to prepare teachers and students for technology infused learning during crisis period and beyond.

Overview of the Nine Papers

This special issue consists of nine empirical studies conducted in different countries and regions including China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and the USA. Six of them deal with student remote learning, and the other three concern teacher remote teaching, during the pandemic. The first paper is Lin’s Taiwanese study. He used three prominent motivation theories related to self-regulated learning – expectancy-value, achievement goal, and social cognitive – to understand university students’ motivations by examining the changes in their values and goals of online learning tasks. He developed and validated a COVID-19 Online Learning Motivation (COLM) questionnaire, and collected 558 students’ online motivation before and after the outbreak of the pandemic. His study suggests that the pandemic has impacted on how the students value the personal relevance and the future expected returns of adopting online learning. Besides, the gaps between students’ ideal and actual motivations may need to be proactively attenuated before the implementation of online learning.

The next three papers used the Structural Equation Modelling technique to examine their proposed research models driven from different theories of motivation, and aim to identify factors influencing students to learn remotely or online in China. The second paper, by Zhou, Chai, Jong and Xiong used SDT and a social cognitive perspective as a framework to investigate how perceived relatedness with instructors and classmates influence online self-regulated learning, perceived learning gains, and satisfaction. They analyzed self-reported survey data from 572 undergraduate students from a teacher education university in Southwest China, and found that relatedness had effects on perceived learning gains and satisfaction mediated by online self-regulated learning. They conclude that teachers can promote students online self-regulated learning by building a learning community and designing collaborative learning activities. The third paper, by Lian, Chai, Zheng and Liang, recruited 529 non-English major students from a comprehensive university in northern China, and examined their model regarding the intricated relationships among the perceptions of meaningful learning such as self-directed learning, collaborative learning, self-efficacy. The results revealed that student perceived authentic language learning has a strong relationship with their English self-efficacy. This relationship can be mediated by collaborative, but not self-directed learning. These findings suggest that online collaborative learning opportunities appeared to be more pronounced for students when learning alone at home, and structuring authentic language learning with self-directed and collaborative learning is very important for blended learning. The fourth paper conducted by Lin, Jin, Zhao, Yu and Su, used switching behavior to explain student initial motivation (behavioral intention) in transiting face-to-face to online learning. They examined their proposed Push–Pull-Mooring model to understand the influence of habits and switching costs on student motivation to the harsh transition. Their results showed that the push effects (perceived security risk, learning convenience, and service quality), pull effects (usefulness, ease of use, teacher’s teaching attitude, task technology fit), and mooring effects (switching cost, habit) can predict the transition intention. The findings suggest that teachers should take these relevant factors into account when accommodating students into a new online learning environment.

The fifth and sixth papers aim to understand what and how to design effective online tasks to constantly motivate students in learning. The fifth paper, by Lee, So, Ha, Kim, and Park, conducted an experimental study to examine the patterns of students’ academic emotions and facial expressions detected in asynchronous video-based learning. They used Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System to analyze the recorded video data collected from 25 Korean students, and analyzed interview data to understand the plausible explanations for students’ negative emotions. This paper suggests how to detect and intervene in potential issues associated with student motivation and affective states. The sixth paper, by Ismailov and Ono, used expectancy-value, SDT and the Attention Relevance Confident Satisfaction (ARCS) model to identify the design characteristics of the online tasks assigned to 80 Japanese first year undergraduate students. Their inductive content analysis revealed that student motivation was strongly associated with student autonomy, social interaction, personal interest, and practical utility of the tasks. They suggest that teachers should pay more attention to the motivational effects of the designed instructional materials and assignments.

Teacher motivation and capacity have emerged as the top priority in remote learning. The last three papers are qualitative studies and concern how teachers teaching in different educational settings. The seventh paper, by Moorhouse and Kohnke, used SDT as framework to interview university teachers in Hong Kong and identify two distinct teacher groups as either Thriving or Surviving. The results showed that the Thriving teacher group gained new instructional skill as the online teaching reinvigorated their teaching, and the Surviving group questioned their ability to teach because they felt isolated, struggled, and unsatisfied. The eighth paper, by Lambert, identified challenges a special education teacher from California faced when teaching mathematics to students with disabilities. An inductive thematic analysis revealed that one of the biggest challenges was supporting students with productive struggle in remote teaching. The findings suggest that fostering student engagement in mathematical problem-solving require considering emotional and affective dimensions of learning and coaching students and families in self-regulation strategies. The last paper, by Tay, Lee and Ramachandran, investigated how to design effective online home-based lessons for elementary and secondary student engagement. They adopted a ground-up thematic analysis to analyze interview data from elicit eight Singapore mathematics teachers. The findings suggest five design components including student engagement, technology, teacher professional development, social networking platforms and self-directed learning for the effective online lessons.

In sum, the major themes that emerged for the above studies seem to be motivation, socialization, and self-directedness. While these are familiar themes in educational research, the pandemic has greatly enhanced its importance in that without sufficiently strong pedagogical designs in these aspects, and the building of students’ capacities and repertoires in these areas, learning will virtually grind to a complete stop.

Challenges and Future Development

The current pandemic is catalyzing a global debate on how knowledge, education and learning need to be reimagined in a world of increasing complexity, uncertainty, and precarity. The papers in this special issue raise 8 challenges that are pertinent in the times of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. We summarize the challenges raised and suggest future development as follows; therefore, hope they can facilitate discussions among researchers and practitioners on how to rethink education and shape the future of learning and teaching.

Attending to initial and maintaining student and teacher motivation for the emergency transition from face-to-face to online (remote) learning. Understanding the motivational process from the initial arousal of the motivation to the sustained motivation of unfamiliar and sudden environments is necessary.

Preparing students for future learning. Most current studies suggest self-directed and collaborative learning as prerequisite skills for online instruction. Using online technology-assisted environments to foster the digital skills needs to feature more strongly in future research, i.e., nurture the skills and cultivate self-efficacy from various aspects during online learning.

Addressing the psychological needs of students in designing online learning. Previous studies related to online learning give primacy to autonomy and competence support for cognitive development (Chiu, 2021 ). Future studies should pay more attention to relatedness support and emotional development for student wellbeing.

Promoting technology-supported social and collaborative environments for peer mutual support. Current online learning studies highlight the importance of collaborative learning need to add specifically mutual peer support and social presence (Sormunen, 2020 ).

Enhancing teacher’s design beliefs and efficacy for applying theories in motivating students. Currently, there are many theories and principles for better engaging students in online environments (Chiu et al., 2020 ; Ryan & Deci, 2020 ); however, teachers may not able to execute the theoretical ideas in teaching. To bridge the gaps between theory and practice, teacher professional development program should encourage teachers to operationalize and implement what they learned from theories to experience the benefits, rather than telling them what the theories and principles are.

Supporting teacher wellbeing. Discussions about teacher wellbeing is overlooked as a ‘nice to have’ rather than as essential, and is often dominated by negative mental health. Wellbeing is not only essential to cope with negative situations, but also encompassing ideas such as job satisfaction and good relationships. It is important to think about and promote teacher wellbeing in a more holistic way (both negative and positive), which benefit both student and teacher learning. Recent research indicate that wellbeing may coexist with burnout symptoms, when teachers are devoted and simultaneously lack resources and work too hard. In a study by Salmela-Aro et al. ( 2019 ) Finnish teachers appeared to be very committed and engaged to their work, whereas many suffered at the same time some signs of exhaustion and inadequacy as a teacher. After COVID-19, it shall be important to follow and promote teachers’ wellbeing in Asian countries as well.

Addressing equity and social justice concerns in learning with technology (Chiu & Lim, 2020 ). Majority of educational studies related to the pandemic are conducted in mainstream schools or city areas. More studies are needed to investigate how to use technology to support minority groups such as students with special education need (inclusive education) and students living in rural areas (digital divide).

At a policy level, studies are also needed to reexamine research related to how the pandemic impact educational policies in Asian countries, while comparing with policies of more progressive countries (e.g., the United Kingdom, Australia), in order to better rethink what our future digital education should be envisioned.

Conclusively, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in school closures all across the world, triggering unprecedented challenges for education systems, and its impact on the world’s education, particularly online learning, will be long lasting and resurging. It is clear that the future of education needs rethinking in many ways amid the pandemic. We truly hope this special issue will facilitate our discussions and research about the future of learning and teaching related to motivation.

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Chiu, T. K. F. (2021). Applying the self-determination theory (SDT) to explain student engagement in online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 1–17. 10.1080/15391523.2021.1891998.
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How does virtual learning impact students in higher education?

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, stephanie riegg cellini stephanie riegg cellini nonresident senior fellow - governance studies , brown center on education policy.

August 13, 2021

In 2020, the pandemic pushed millions of college students around the world into virtual learning. As the new academic year begins, many colleges in the U.S. are poised to bring students back to campus, but a large amount of uncertainty remains. Some institutions will undoubtedly continue to offer online or hybrid classes, even as in-person instruction resumes. At the same time, low vaccination rates, new coronavirus variants, and travel restrictions for international students may mean a return to fully online instruction for some U.S. students and many more around the world.

Public attention has largely focused on the learning losses of K-12 students who shifted online during the pandemic. Yet, we may have reason to be concerned about postsecondary students too. What can we expect from the move to virtual learning? How does virtual learning impact student outcomes? And how does it compare to in-person instruction at the postsecondary level?

Several new papers shed light on these issues, building on previous work in higher education and assessing the efficacy of online education in new contexts. The results are generally consistent with past research: Online coursework generally yields worse student performance than in-person coursework. The negative effects of online course-taking are particularly pronounced for less-academically prepared students and for students pursuing bachelor’s degrees. New evidence from 2020 also suggests that the switch to online course-taking in the pandemic led to declines in course completion. However, a few new studies point to some positive effects of online learning, too. This post discusses this new evidence and its implications for the upcoming academic year.

Evaluating online instruction in higher education

A number of studies have assessed online versus in-person learning at the college level in recent years. A key concern in this literature is that students typically self-select into online or in-person programs or courses, confounding estimates of student outcomes. That is, differences in the characteristics of students themselves may drive differences in the outcome measures we observe that are unrelated to the mode of instruction. In addition, the content, instructor, assignments, and other course features might differ across online and in-person modes as well, which makes apples-to-apples comparisons difficult.

The most compelling studies of online education draw on a random assignment design (i.e., randomized control trial or RCT) to isolate the causal effect of online versus in-person learning. Several pathbreaking studies were able to estimate causal impacts of performance on final exams or course grades in recent years. Virtually all of these studies found that online instruction resulted in lower student performance relative to in-person instruction; although in one case , students with hybrid instruction performed similarly to their in-person peers. Negative effects of online course-taking were particularly pronounced for males and less-academically prepared students.

A new paper by Kofoed and co-authors adds to this literature looking specifically at online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic in a novel context: the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. When many colleges moved classes completely online or let students choose their own mode of instruction at the start of the pandemic, West Point economics professors arranged to randomly assign students to in-person or online modes of learning. The same instructors taught one online and one in-person economics class each, and all materials, exams, and assignments were otherwise identical, minimizing biases that otherwise stand in the way of true comparisons. They find that online education lowered a student’s final grade by about 0.2 standard deviations. Their work also confirms the results of previous papers, finding that the negative effect of online learning was driven by students with lower academic ability. A follow-up survey of students’ experiences suggests that online students had trouble concentrating on their coursework and felt less connected to both their peers and instructors relative to their in-person peers.

Cacault et al. (2021) also use an RCT to assess the effects of online lectures in a Swiss university. The authors find that having access to a live-streamed lecture in addition to an in-person option improves the achievement of high-ability students, but lowers the achievement of low-ability students. The key to understanding this two-pronged effect is the counterfactual: When streamed lectures substitute for no attendance (e.g., if a student is ill), they can help students, but when streaming lectures substitute for in-person attendance, they can hurt students.

Broader impacts of online learning

One drawback of RCTs is that these studies are typically limited to a single college and often a single course within that college, so it is not clear if the results generalize to other contexts. Several papers in the literature draw on larger samples of students in non-randomized settings and mitigate selection problems with various econometric methods. These papers find common themes: Students in online courses generally get lower grades, are less likely to perform well in follow-on coursework, and are less likely to graduate than similar students taking in-person classes.

In a recent paper , my co-author Hernando Grueso and I add to this strand of the literature, expanding it to a very different context. We draw on data from the country of Colombia, where students take a mandatory exit exam when they graduate. Using these data, we can assess test scores as an outcome, rather than (more subjective) course grades used in other studies. We can also assess performance across a wide range of institutions, degree programs, and majors.

We find that bachelor’s degree students in online programs perform worse on nearly all test score measures—including math, reading, writing, and English—relative to their counterparts in similar on-campus programs. Results for shorter technical certificates, however, are more mixed. While online students perform significantly worse than on-campus students on exit exams in private institutions, they perform better in SENA, the main public vocational institution in the country, suggesting substantial heterogeneity across institutions in the quality of online programming. Interviews with SENA staff indicate that SENA’s approach of synchronous learning and real-world projects may be working for some online students, but we cannot definitively call this causal evidence, particularly because we can only observe the students who graduate.

A new working paper by Fischer et al. pushes beyond near-term outcomes, like grades and scores, to consider longer-term outcomes, like graduation and time-to-degree, for bachelor’s degree-seeking students in a large public university in California. They find reason to be optimistic about online coursework: When students take courses required for their major online, they are more likely to graduate in four years and see a small decrease in time-to-degree relative to students taking the requirements in-person.

On the other hand, new work considering course completion during the pandemic is less promising. Looking at student outcomes in spring 2020 in Virginia’s community college system, Bird et al. find that the switch to online instruction resulted in an 8.5% reduction in course completion. They find that both withdrawals and failures rose. They also confirm findings in the literature that negative impacts are more extreme among less-academically-prepared students.

Online learning in the fall and beyond

Much more research on virtual learning will undoubtedly be forthcoming post-pandemic. For now, college professors and administrators should consider that college students pushed online may be less prepared for future follow-on classes, their GPAs may be lower, course completion may suffer, and overall learning may have declined relative to in-person cohorts in previous years. These results seem particularly problematic for students with less academic preparation and those in bachelor’s degree programs.

The research is less clear on the impact of virtual instruction on college completion. Although course completion rates appear to be lower for online courses relative to in-person, the evidence is mixed on the impact of virtual instruction on graduation and time-to-degree. The negative learning impacts, reduced course completion, and lack of connection with other students and faculty in a virtual environment could ultimately reduce college completion rates. On the other hand, there is also evidence that the availability of online classes may allow students to move through their degree requirement more quickly.

As the fall semester approaches, colleges will need to make critical choices about online, hybrid, and in-person course offerings. Maintaining some of the most successful online courses will enhance flexibility at this uncertain time and allow some students to continue to make progress on their degrees if they get sick or cannot return to campus for other reasons. For those transitioning back to campus, administrators might consider additional in-person programming, review sessions, tutoring, and other enhanced supports as students make up for learning losses associated with the virtual instruction of the past year.

What the Covid-19 Pandemic Revealed About Remote School

The unplanned experiment provided clear lessons on the value—and limitations—of online learning. Are educators listening?

Katherine Reynolds Lewis, Undark Magazine

Student takes part in remote distance learning

The transition to online learning in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic was, by many accounts, a failure. While there were some bright spots across the country, the transition was messy and uneven — countless teachers had neither the materials nor training they needed to effectively connect with students remotely, while many of those students were bored , isolated, and lacked the resources they needed to learn. The results were abysmal: low test scores, fewer children learning at grade level, increased inequity, and teacher burnout. With the public health crisis on top of deaths and job losses in many families, students experienced increases in depression, anxiety, and suicide risk.

Yet society very well may face new widespread calamities in the near future, from another pandemic to extreme weather, that will require a similarly quick shift to remote school. Success will hinge on big changes, from infrastructure to teacher training, several experts told Undark. “We absolutely need to invest in ways for schools to run continuously, to pick up where they left off. But man, it’s a tall order,” said Heather L. Schwartz, a senior policy researcher at RAND. “It’s not good enough for teachers to simply refer students to disconnected, stand-alone videos on, say, YouTube. Students need lessons that connect directly to what they were learning before school closed.”

More than three years after U.S. schools shifted to remote instruction on an emergency basis, the education sector is still largely unprepared for another long-term interruption of in-person school. The stakes are highest for those who need it most: low-income children and students of color, who are also most likely to be harmed in a future pandemic or live in communities most affected by climate change. But, given the abundance of research on what didn’t work during the pandemic, school leaders may have the opportunity to do things differently next time. Being ready would require strategic planning, rethinking the role of the teacher, and using new technology wisely, experts told Undark. And many problems with remote learning actually trace back not to technology, but to basic instructional quality. Effective remote learning won’t happen if schools aren’t already employing best practices in the physical classroom, such as creating a culture of learning from mistakes, empowering teachers to meet individual student needs, establishing high expectations, and setting clear goals supported by frequent feedback. While it’s ambitious to envision that every school district will create seamless virtual learning platforms — and, for that matter, overcome challenges in education more broadly — the lessons of the pandemic are there to be followed or ignored.

“We haven’t done anywhere near the amount of planning or the development of the instructional infrastructure needed to allow for a smooth transition next time schools need to close for prolonged periods of time,” Schwartz said. “Until we can reach that goal, I don’t have high confidence that the next prolonged school closure will be substantially more successful.”

Before the pandemic, only 3 percent of U.S. school districts offered virtual school, mostly for students with unique circumstances, such as a disability or those intensely pursuing a sport or the performing arts, according to a RAND survey Schwartz co-authored. For the most part, the educational technology companies and developers creating software for these schools promised to give students a personalized experience. But the research on these programs, which focused on virtual charter schools that only existed online, showed poor outcomes . Their students were a year behind in math and nearly a half-year behind in reading, and courses offered less direct time with a teacher each week than regular schools have in a day.

The pandemic sparked growth in stand-alone virtual academies, in addition to the emergency remote learning that districts had to adopt in March 2020. Educators’ interest in online instructional materials exploded, too, according to Schwartz, “and it really put the foot on the gas to ramp them up, expand them, and in theory, improve them.” By June 2021, the number of school districts with a stand-alone virtual school rose to 26 percent. Of the remaining districts, another 23 percent were interested in offering an online school, the report found.

But the sheer magnitude of options for online learning didn’t necessarily mean it worked well, Schwartz said: “It’s the quality part that has to come up in order for this to be a really good, viable alternative to in person instruction.” And individualized, self-directed online learning proved to be a pipe dream — especially for younger children who needed support from a parent or other family member even to get online, much less stay focused.

“The notion that students would have personalized playlists and could curate their own education was proven to be problematic on a couple levels, especially for younger and less affluent students,” said Thomas Toch, director of FutureEd, an education think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. “The social and emotional toll that isolation and those traumas took on students suggest that the social dimension of schooling is hugely important and was greatly undervalued, especially by proponents for an increased role of technology.”

Students also often didn’t have the materials they needed for online school, some lacking computers or internet access at home. Teachers didn’t have the right training for online instruction , which has a unique pedagogy and best practices. As a result, many virtual classrooms attempted to replicate the same lessons over video that would’ve been delivered at school. The results were overwhelmingly bad, research shows. For example, a 2022 study found six consistent themes about how the pandemic affected learning, including a lack of interaction between students and with teachers, and disproportionate harm to low-income students. Numb from isolation and too many hours in front of a screen, students failed to engage in coursework and suffered emotionally .

student is assisted by her mom in online learning while her sister works nearby

After some districts resumed in-person or hybrid instruction in the 2020 fall semester, it became clear that the longer students were remote, the worse their learning delays . For example, national standardized test scores for the 2020-2021 school year showed that passing rates for math declined about 14 percentage points on average, more than three times the drop seen in districts that returned to in-person instruction the earliest, according to a 2021 National Bureau of Economic Research study . Even after most U.S. districts resumed in-person instruction, students who had been online the longest continued to lag behind their peers. The pandemic hit cities hardest and the effects disproportionately harmed low-income children and students of color in urban areas.

“What we did during the pandemic is not the optimal use of online learning in education for the future,” said Ashley Jochim, a researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. “Online learning is not a full stop substitute for what kids need to thrive and be supported at school.”

Children also largely prefer in-person school. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey suggested that 65 percent of students would rather be in a classroom, 9 percent would opt for online only, and the rest are unsure or prefer a hybrid model. “For most families and kids, full-time online school is actually not the educational solution they want,” Jochim said.

Virtual school felt meaningless to Abner Magdaleno, a 12th grader in Los Angeles. “I couldn’t really connect with it, because I’m more of, like, a social person. And that was stripped away from me when we went online,” recalled Magdaleno. Mackenzie Sheehy, 19, of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, found there were too many distractions at home to learn. Her grades suffered, and she missed the one-on-one time with teachers. (Sheehy graduated from high school in 2022.)

Many teachers feel the same way. “Nothing replaces physical proximity, whatever the age,” said Ana Silva, a New York City English teacher. She enjoyed experimenting with interactive technology during online school, but is grateful to be back in person. “I like the casual way kids can come to my desk and see me. I like the dynamism — seeing kids in the cafeteria. Those interactions are really positive, and they were entirely missing during the online learning.”

During the 2022-2023 school year, many districts initially planned to continue online courses for snow days and other building closures. But they found that the teacher instruction, student experience, and demands on families were simply too different for in-person versus remote school, said Liz Kolb, an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Michigan. “Schools are moving away from that because it’s too difficult to quickly transition and blend back and forth among the two without having strong structures in place,” Kolb said. “Most schools don’t have those strong structures.”

In addition, both families and educators grew sick of their screens. “They’re trying to avoid technology a little bit. There’s this fatigue coming out of remote learning and the pandemic,” said Mingyu Feng, a research director at WestEd, a nonprofit research agency. “If the students are on Zoom every day for like, six hours, that seems to be not quite right.”

Despite the bumpy pandemic rollout, online school can serve an important role in the U.S. education system. For one, online learning is a better alternative for some students. Garvey Mortley, 15, of Bethesda, Maryland, and her two sisters all switched to their district’s virtual academy during the pandemic to protect their own health and their grandmother’s. This year, Mortley’s sisters went back to in-person school, but she chose to stay online. “I love the flexibility about it,” she said, noting that some of her classmates prefer it because they have a disability or have demanding schedules. “I love how I can just roll out of bed in the morning, and I can sit down and do school.” Some educators also prefer teaching online, according to reports of virtual schools that were inundated with applications from teachers because they wanted to keep working from home . Silva, the New York high school English teacher, enjoys online tutoring and academic coaching, because it facilitates one-on-one interaction.

And in rural districts and those with low enrollment, some access to online learning ensures students can take courses that could otherwise be inaccessible. “Because of the economies of scale in small rural districts, they needed to tap into online and shared service delivery arrangements in order to provide a full complement of coursework at the high school level,” said Jochim. Innovation in these districts, she added, will accelerate: “We’ll continue to see growth, scalability, and improvement in quality.”

There were also some schools that were largely successful at switching to online at the start of the pandemic, such as Vista Unified School District in California, which pooled and shared innovative ideas for adapting in March 2020; the school quickly put together an online portal so that principals and teachers could share ideas and the district could allot the necessary resources. Digging into examples like this could point the way to the future of online learning, said Chelsea Waite, a senior researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, who was part of a collaborative project studying 70 schools and districts that pivoted successfully to online learning. The project found three factors that made the transition work: a focus on resilience, collaboration, and autonomy for both students and educators; a healthy culture that prioritized relationships; and strong yet flexible systems that were accustomed to adaptation.

Teacher in Boston participates in online learning during the covid-19 pandemic

“We investigated schools that did seem to be more prepared for the Covid disruption, not just with having devices in students’ hands or having an online curriculum already, but with a learning culture in the school that really prioritized agency and problem solving as skills for students and adults,” Waite said. “In these schools, kids are learning from a very young age to be a little bit more self-directed, to set goals, and pursue them and pivot when they need to.”

Similarly, many of the takeaways from the pandemic trace back to the basics of effective education, not technological innovation. A landmark report by the National Academies of Sciences called “How People Learn,” most recently updated in 2018, synthesized the body of educational research and identified four key features in the most successful learning environments. First, these schools are designed for, and adapt to, the specific students, building on what they bring to the classroom, such as skills and beliefs. Second, successful schools give their students clear goals, showing them what they need to learn and how they can get there. Third, they provide in-the-moment feedback that emphasizes understanding, not memorization. And finally, the most successful schools are community-centered, with a culture of collaboration and acceptance of mistakes.

“We as humans are social learners, yet some of the tech talk is driven by people who are strong individual learners,” said Jeremy Roschelle, executive director of Learning Sciences Research at Digital Promise, a global education nonprofit. “They’re not necessarily thinking about how most people learn, which is very social.”

Another powerful insight from pandemic-era remote schooling involves the evolving role of teachers, said Kim Kelly, a middle school math teacher at Northbridge Middle School in Massachusetts and a K-8 curriculum coach. Historically, a teacher’s role is the keeper of knowledge who delivers instruction. But in recent years, there has been a shift in approach, where teachers think of themselves as coaches who can intervene based on a student’s individual learning progress. Technology that assists with a coach-like role can be effective — but requires educators to be trained and comfortable interpreting data on student needs.

For example, with a digital learning platform called ASSISTments, teachers can assign math problems, students complete them — potentially receiving in-the-moment feedback on steps they’re getting wrong — and then the teachers can use data from individual students and the entire class to plan instruction and see where additional support is needed.

“A big advantage of these computer-driven products is they really try to diagnose where students are, and try to address their needs. It’s very personalized, individualized,” said WestEd’s Feng, who has evaluated ASSISTments and other educational technologies. She noted that some teachers feel frustrated “when you expect them to read the data and try to figure out what the students’ needs are.”

Teacher’s colleges don’t typically prepare educators to interpret data and change their practices, said Kelly, whose dissertation focused on self-regulated online learning. But professional development has helped her learn to harness technology to improve teaching and learning. “Schools are in data overload; we are oozing data from every direction, yet none of it is very actionable,” she said. Some technology, she added, provided student data that she could use regularly, which changed how she taught and assigned homework.

When students get feedback from the computer program during a homework session, the whole class doesn’t have to review the homework together, which can save time. Educators can move forward on instruction — or if they see areas of confusion, focus more on those topics. The ability of the programs to detect how well students are learning “is unreal,” said Kelly, “but it really does require teachers to be monitoring that data and interpreting.” She learned to accept that some students could drive their own learning and act on the feedback from homework, while others simply needed more teacher intervention. She now does more assessment at the beginning of a course to better support all students.

At the district or even national level, letting teachers play to their strengths can also help improve how their students learn, Toch, of FutureEd, said. For example, if a teacher is better at delivering instruction, they could give a lesson to a larger group of students online, while another teacher who is more comfortable in the coach role could work in smaller groups or one-on-one.

“One thing we saw during the pandemic are smart strategies for using technology to get outstanding teachers in front of more students,” Toch said, describing one effort that recruited exceptional teachers nationally and built a strong curriculum to be delivered online. “The local educators were providing support for their students in their classrooms.”

Remote schooling requires new technology, and already, educators are swamped with competing platforms and software choices — most of which have insufficient evidence of efficacy . Traditional independent research on specific technologies is sparse, Roschelle said. Post-pandemic, the field is so diverse and there are so many technologies in use, it’s almost impossible to find a control group to design a randomized control trial, he added. However, there is qualitative research and evidence that give hints about the quality of technology and online learning, such as case studies and school recommendations.

Educational leaders should ask three key questions about technology before investing, recommended Ryan Baker, a professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania: Is there evidence it works to improve learning outcomes? Does the vendor provide support and training, or are teachers on their own? And does it work with the same types of students as are in their school or district? In other words, educators must look at a technology’s track record in the context of their own school’s demographics, geography, culture, and challenges. These decisions are complicated by the small universe of researchers and evaluators, who have many overlapping relationships. (Over his career, for example, Baker has worked with or consulted for many of the education technology firms that create the software he studies.)

It may help to broaden the definition of evidence. The Center on Reinventing Public Education launched the Canopy project to collect examples of effective educational innovation around the U.S.

“What we wanted to do is build much better and more open and collective knowledge about where schools are challenging old assumptions and redesigning what school is and should be,” she added, noting that these educational leaders are reconceptualizing the skills they want students to attain. “They’re often trying to measure or communicate concepts that we don’t have great measurement tools for yet. So they end up relying on a lot of testimonials and evidence of student work.”

The moment is ripe for innovation in online and in-person education, said Julia Fallon, executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, since the pandemic accelerated the rollout of devices and needed infrastructure. There’s an opportunity and need for technology that empowers teachers to improve learning outcomes and work more efficiently, said Roschelle. Online and hybrid learning are clearly here to stay — and likely will be called upon again during future temporary school closures.

Still, poorly-executed remote learning risks tainting the whole model; parents and students may be unlikely to give it a second chance. The pandemic showed the hard and fast limits on the potential for fully remote learning to be adopted broadly, for one, because in many communities, schools serve more than an educational function — they support children’s mental health, social needs, and nutrition and other physical health needs. The pandemic also highlighted the real challenge in training the entire U.S. teaching corps to be proficient in technology and data analysis. And the lack of a nimble shift to remote learning in an emergency will disproportionately harm low-income children and students of color. So the stakes are high for getting it right, experts told Undark, and summoning the political will.

“There are these benefits in online education, but there are also these real weaknesses we know from prior research and experience,” Jochim said. “So how do we build a system that has online learning as a complement to this other set of supports and experiences that kids benefit from?”

Katherine Reynolds Lewis is an award-winning journalist covering children, race, gender, disability, mental health, social justice, and science.

This article was originally published on Undark . Read the original article .

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