Education International
academics are against online teaching, rather, that they understand the difference between ‘good’ online education and the rapid transition to online learning that they have been asked to adopt during 2020. Indeed, there has long been a sense that HE needs digital transformation, and new ways to connect with diverse learners. But what tends to happen and perhaps what the PPP between Arizona University, Arizona University Global Campus and Zovio suggests - is that these online options are ‘second-tier’ and tied to enhanced profit making agendas. The online teaching happening during this pandemic is not a representation of what online learning should be. It is merely instructors and students adapting as best they can to provide continuity of learning. A future of enhanced online learning in HE shouldn’t be driven by start-up companies and private capital, but by academic freedom in understanding what good and thoughtful online and hybridised learning is. It should pay attention to student desires and also be critical of the claims of commercial edtech. Similarly, academics should be able to have the freedom to choose what products and services, if any, they want to adopt. In particular, we should be wary of products that threaten professional autonomy, where course material and assessment is organised by what can be datafied and coded.
7. Reproducing inequalities For many students, particularly student-consumers with monetary resources, they have been able to maintain a connection to their HE degree throughout the pandemic. But there are also students that have been left with little option other than to pause or cancel their enrolments. Inequities are shaped by gender, class, culture, race and geopolitical context. Much of this report has focused on the Anglophone context, both by the limitations of its monolingual authors, and the geopolitical contexts in which we reside. It’s obvious from this exercise that there are inequities in hastily adopted online learning for disadvantaged students in Anglophone contexts, particularly those who were reliant on attending campus for computers and internet access. But globally, there are both similar and different concerns for HE. In South Africa, for example, Czerniewicz et al (2020) have reported how the pandemic has revealed and exacerbates inequalities: This enforced visibility has made the covert overt: the lockdown has forced us to look much closer to where our students are, where they are positioned, what resources they have, what opportunities to engage in teaching and learning. And we cannot unsee these differences, whether on or off-campus. Enforced visibility places a 62
