2020-04-07T10:00:29.

413Z Katie Good

School’s online, but high-tech bells and

whistles can’t replace good teaching
The reality, of course, is more complicated. While online instruction
has been growing for years, it has also been hampered by inequalities
of technological access and literacy. Not all students own a personal
computer, and nearly 40 percent of K-12 students live in homes that
lack an Internet connection.

Students and teachers alike may also struggle to adapt to technology,

especially given the e ects of social distancing policies that have left
families jostling for time, space, equipment and bandwidth to continue
their work and education online.

In addition, the mass deployment of digital technology for remote

instruction has exposed serious security aws. While Zoom has been
adopted widely by educational institutions across the country, the New
York City Department of Education recently banned it, citing security
and data privacy concerns.

The nationwide leap toward remote instruction has revived discussions

that this is the “future” of education. But in reality, these classes are
part of a long history of distance learning that spans more than a
century. Before computers and the Internet, or even television and
radio, millions of Americans received an education through distance-
learning programs. As we scale up remote instruction during the global
pandemic, we should remember a lesson that the for-pro t “EdTech”
sector would rather we forget: Distance learning doesn’t have to be
high tech to be e ective.

The longest-running and farthest-reaching form of distance education

in the United States is the print-based correspondence course. These
courses exploded in popularity in the late 19th century, enabled by the
increasing e ciency of commercial printing and the U.S. postal system.

An early popularizer of distance education was the International

Correspondence Schools (ICS). Founded in Scranton, Pa., in 1891 by
Thomas J. Foster, the company’s original aim was to educate working
miners on mine safety. Yet, its “teaching-by-mail” program took o ,
and soon the ICS was mailing illustrated textbooks, exams and other
coursework to thousands of workers in a variety of rapidly growing
professions, including engineering, accounting, advertising, teaching
and plumbing.

Foster recognized that adult learners, many of them immigrants or

rst-generation Americans juggling work and family responsibilities,
needed a convenient way to obtain credentials and technical knowledge
to advance in their careers.

The ICS touted its practical, no-nonsense approach to education while

highlighting the unique bene ts of remote learning. “While [the
student] is without the personal presence of the teacher, a link between
him and his teacher is established by the frequent correspondence,”
the company explained in its 1910 catalogue, “A Day in the World’s
Schoolhouse.” “The student does not have to leave home to secure an
education — the education comes to him. He does not have to dress for
class, has no car fare to pay. Each student is a class to himself.”

While for-pro t correspondence schools were regarded as less

legitimate and more prone to cheating and fraud than traditional
degree-granting programs, they were nonetheless very popular. By
1930, the ICS had enrolled over 4 million students. It was deemed so
e ective that the U.S. Department of War contracted it to produce
training manuals during World War II.

Correspondence courses gained greater academic legitimacy when they

were adopted by universities. William Rainey Harper, the rst president
of the University of Chicago, was a prominent advocate of collegiate
correspondence courses at the turn of the 20th century. Harper
championed correspondence coursework as one way to bring higher
education to students who lacked the time or money to travel to college
campuses.

At this time, public universities were also beginning to o er

correspondence courses as part of their emerging extension services.
Later bolstered by federal and state funding allocated through the
Smith-Lever Act of 1914, extension services o ered educational
programs to rural and urban communities beyond university campuses.
Many allowed students to earn college credits and entire degrees
through correspondence, a service that was particularly valuable to
farmers, workers and veterans.

Some early extension programs were designed to meet the needs of

working-class and marginalized communities. In 1906, Booker T.
Washington and George Washington Carver, working at the Tuskegee
Institute in Alabama, co-founded an educational service called the
Movable School, also dubbed the “Farmer’s College on Wheels.”
Beginning as a simple horse-drawn cart and later by motorized trucks,
the Movable School brought resources, including seed packets, crop
and equipment samples, nurses, educators in farming and home
economics and eventually educational lms, to rural communities
throughout Alabama and neighboring states, aiming to serve African
American farmers who were denied educational services in the Jim
Crow South.

Its success, operating for almost 40 years before it was replaced by

larger extension services, points to an idea that many educators have
recently underscored amid the coronavirus upheaval: Remote
education must be responsive to the challenges and stressors that
students face.

Distance education also bene ts from robust public infrastructures of

communication and education. Correspondence courses, whether for
pro t or for public educational purposes, owed much of their success to
their reliance on the postal system, which was a ordable and reliable
for most Americans to use. Because today’s Internet is commercialized,
many cannot a ord to access it, making online education less equitable
than old-fashioned correspondence.

Likewise, extension services of public universities bene ted from

strong state support for higher education that existed in the 20th
century, but that has declined signi cantly since the Great Recession.
Unlike today’s corporate EdTech tools and platforms, extension
services existed not to pro t o learners’ education or collect their data
to convert into sources of revenue, but to serve the public. While some
correspondence courses brought revenue to public universities, their
primary aim was to bring the fruits of modern academic research and
education to the public.

While it’s not practical — or even desirable — to move all of today’s

courses o ine and teach them through the mail, we should still take
inspiration from distance education’s low-tech roots.
For starters, teachers shouldn’t feel pressured to adopt all of the bells
and whistles associated with new educational platforms and products.
Those who have the choice should feel free to forgo synchronous class
meetings in favor of asynchronous instruction, which experts advise is
more equitable, given students’ uneven access to technology and varied
schedules. Furthermore, educators can accomplish a great deal with
simple, text-based approaches to teaching and interacting with
students online — including readings, quizzes, discussions, student
writing and regular instructor and peer feedback.

Videos, social media, multimedia and live conferences, while powerful

tools for learning, may be overwhelming and costly for some students
and teachers to use, particularly in this time of mass disruption. Even
corresponding with students directly over school-approved email can
be an e ective form of pedagogy. It’s a faster version of what’s worked
for generations of distance educators before us.

To e ectively manage a distance-education program well, educators

and students will need time, resources and guidance — all of which are
in short supply right now. But one of the best things we can do is talk to
one another about why we are making the choices we are. Whether
using text-based or more multimodal approaches, what matters most
is that teachers establish “social presence,” a level of connection with
students that helps them feel motivated and equipped to learn.

The current crisis is pushing us all to think about how to do distance

education di erently, making wise use of tools and techniques to teach
students e ectively while attending to the challenges they face. In this
case, our low-tech past has critical lessons for our high-tech present
and future.

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