Matthew Rascoff, Vice Provost for Digital Education at Stanford University, talks about the positive learnings from the pandemic’s emergency remote learning experiment, breaking the boundary between in-school and after-school learning, and the future of digital education.
What exactly is “digital education,” and what did the pandemic teach us about it?
The pandemic created frustrating online educational experiences for many. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few aspects of digital education worth preserving, investing in, or growing for the long term.
Matthew Rascoff joins us to dive into innovation challenges in education and how they can serve our students today and in the future.
Digital Education: What It Is and What It’s Not
On its face, digital education means learning online. But all of us with remote learners during the pandemic can remember disengaged children who barely participated.
That said, it’s important to distinguish between the emergency remote teaching precipitated by the pandemic and true online learning fueled by intentional design.
“Online learning is something that is the output of a backwards design process that starts with learning goals, and then figures out how you're going to support them,” Matthew says. It was an urgent response to a crisis — not how we want to design great learning experiences.
True digital education should include the hybrid innovations and creativity emerging in the online learning space. Exclusively online or exclusively in-class learning might not be the right fit for K-12 students, but hybrid might be, Matthew says.
Hybrid learning, inclusive of creative technology, empowered faculty, and students with the necessary skills and tools, could well become the future of education.
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4 Lessons to Preserve From Pandemic Learning
Matthew points out four learnings from emergency remote teaching he thinks are worth developing into true online learning:
- Digital education was a mass professional development experience for educators. These skills cannot be unlearned, and many teachers now know what they want to keep doing.
- The pandemic underscored the academic and economic leveling that on-campus learning creates. The inequalities became even more visible when people tried to access education from their homes.
- Remote education reinforced whole-person learning and teaching, especially with regards to mental health.
- The pandemic created newfound respect for the role of the learning designer, the frontline workers of online learning.
“School is learning embedded in a social experience,” Matthew says, elaborating on points two and three. Without the holistic and social aspects of education, as the pandemic removed, we seriously underserve our students.
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Breaking Boundaries Between In-School and After-School
“Learning technologies have the potential to help bridge the gap between school and home,” Matthew says. Here are some ways the pandemic helped show us what’s possible in our approach to learning.
Bidirectional Communication
Teachers and families can communicate more easily and with shorter feedback cycles. This increases transparency and visibility between the classroom and the home.
Virtual Resources
Educational technology allows students access to more types of expanded and extended learning, including enrichment opportunities like virtual field trips, virtual science labs, citizen scientist apps, and machine-learning-driven differentiated education.
Dual Credit Courses
Programs like the dual enrollment computer science pilot program at Stanford allow enrolled students to earn high school and college credit simultaneously.
“There's a lot of promise in dual enrollment in bridging another boundary, which is the high school to college boundary,” Matthew says.
“Dual enrollment says you're not on your own. It's also about seeing yourself as part of a great academic community with all of the expanded learning horizons that come from a catalog that covers every discipline known to humankind.”
Addressing Educational Inequity
The future of digital education is an optimistic one. While there are no easy answers to the big challenges in education, technology and innovation, there are opportunities for new approaches poised to effect change to educational inequity.
The zip code you are raised in, your family background, or your access to education should not determine your life outcomes — though it often does.
“We need to do everything in our power to ensure the next generation gets the full benefit of all the creativity and artistic inspiration and brilliant ideas that our young problem solvers can generate, no matter where they're from,” Matthew says.
Action Steps for Parents
1 - Keep Balance
Keep breadth and depth in balance. The two are not opposites. You are not tied either to the Federer model of broad exposure to varied sports, or to the Tiger Woods model of golfing at age three.
Educational success is T-shaped with exposure to many different fields as well as opportunity to delve into the one or two areas driven by the interests of the learner.
2 - Embrace Growth
Embrace a growth mindset in education and life. It’s both the belief in the idea that intelligence is not fixed plus the idea that allows students to actually learn more.
When parents support that belief and understanding for students by surrounding them with a growth mindset, they will bring that conviction to their pursuit of learning.
To that end, we should take the lessons learned from the pandemic – both what went terribly and what went surprisingly well – to continue to blur the boundary between in-school and after-school with innovation in digital education.
Resource Recommendations
Learn more about educational equity at Stanford Digital Pathways (National Education Equity Lab), and check out these resources that Matthew recommends:
For more ways to support your advanced problem solver, check out our free Raising Problem Solvers Guidebook, filled with resources and actionable strategies you can start using today.
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