ODLAA: Distance education across critical theoretical landscapes - touchstones for quality research and teaching

Our partner, Open Distance Learning Association of Australia (ODLAA), recently wrote an Editorial in the Distance Education Journal.

Here is a short excerpt from the editorial:

“Web-based learning technologies have greatly expanded open, flexible, and distance educational environments. Alongside this growth, efforts need to be made to meet the needs of diverse learners and increase our capacity for diversity, in all of its forms. While it might be tempting to think that online environments are inherently more accommodating to diversity, Barbour and Reeves argued that the factors that make a student successful using learning technologies are often connected to socioeconomic privilege.

Moreover, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that smooth transitions to online and distance learning are for those with resources, while most students have experienced considerable stress and anguish just finding a place where they could log on to the Internet or even a convenient way to communicate with their instructors. Most of what schools were doing could not even be called online or distance learning, with such terms as emergency or the milder remote learning applied instead.”

Read the full editorial here.