The Synchronous Disruption of Higher Education: The Synchronous Tsunami

the great wave off kanagawa, a classic Japanese woodcut showing a Tsunami wave with boats in the foreground and Mount Fuji in the distance
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In this post, one of a series on “The Synchronous Disruption of Higher Education,” I examine how the pandemic-era mass adoption of synchronous tools like Zoom has “disrupted” Higher Education. My argument in this post is that the explosive rise of synchronous education was “disruptive” in three important respects; it was a disruptive practice adopted at a profoundly disruptive moment, based upon a technology that had risen to prominence as a classic “disruptive innovation.” To tease apart these three layers of “disruption,” to see how significant they are, and to explain why I’m neither happy nor angry about them, let’s talk a second about what “disruptive innovation” means. Along the way, I want to persuade you that the adoption of synchronous online teaching methods and the web-based teleconferencing tech they are built on, represent the most rapid changes in educational practice in all of history.

Today people often speak of a new product or service as “disruptive” when they mean that it is “innovative or groundbreaking” in a way makes it decisively better and somehow cooler than other options. However, that vaguely positive usage is not true to Dr. Clayton Christensen’s original concept of “disruptive innovation.” Despite the widespread misuse of the term, “disruptive innovations are NOT breakthrough technologies that make good products better; rather they are innovations that make products and services more accessible and affordable, thereby making them available to a larger population.” As the Christensen Institute makes clear, disruptive technologies are often initially of lower quality or features than established products, but they are adopted because they are cheaper or easier to get.

“disruptive innovations are NOT breakthrough technologies that make good products better; rather they are innovations that make products and services more accessible and affordable, thereby making them available to a larger population.

The Christensen Institute

Web-based teleconferencing, most closely identified with brands like Zoom, WebEx, and Skype, was originally a “disruptive technology” in the classic sense meant by Christensen. In relation to the expensive dedicated appliances and reserved telecom lines that were previously necessary for teleconferencing, web-based teleconferencing was a “disruptive innovation” within the teleconferencing market. True to the classic pattern of disruptive innovations, Web-based teleconferencing was initially of lower quality and reliability than dedicated teleconferencing systems, but its low cost and easy availability made it relevant to a massively larger audience. Well before the pandemic, web-based teleconferencing had matured from a disruptive technology into a dominant technology in teleconferencing; it was poised and ready to scale up at the very moment when it would become indispensable. During the incredibly disruptive and disruptive pandemic years, synchronous educational methods powered by this technology became a disruptive innovation in Higher Education.

In the spring of 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic created the most disruptive moment yet in the history of education. In Higher Education, campus closures forced most onsite courses and academic programs to go online in the US and world within weeks. This situation was well described by an authoritative editorial issued by the National Council for Online Education, which was first published in Inside Higher Ed, and then in the in the blog of the Online Learning Consortium. “Emergency Remote Instruction is Not Quality Online Learning,”

The pandemic and resulting quarantines are large-scale crises unlike anything we have ever faced. During the spring of 2020, more than 4,000 U.S. higher education institutions were forced to mobilize emergency remote instruction for more than 20 million students.

National Council for Online Education

A return to similar methods of instruction occurred in early 2022 as the Omicron variant forced another wave of closures. As explained in a companion post, The Synchronous Disruption of Higher Education: “Emergency Remote Teaching,” a massive proportion of this “emergency remote instruction” used Zoom and other synchronous technologies to try to recreate the classroom experience through online class meetings. This massive, sudden adoption of web-teleconferencing technology to create online class meetings was, without doubt, the most rapid wave of instructional change in all of human history, an educational tsunami of stunning speed and size. It profoundly changed the teaching and learning practice of many thousands of professors and millions of students within a few weeks. However, it’s important to notice that the speed and scale of the adoption were only part of its impact. The sudden move online was so significant because it specifically affected the institutions, programs, professors, and classes that had not already gone online; furthermore, it brought them suddenly online in ways that circumvented the carefully curated pathways of conventional Online Learning.

This massive, sudden adoption of web-teleconferencing technology to create online class meetings was, without doubt, the most rapid wave of instructional change in all of human history, an educational tsunami of stunning speed and size.

Over the last two decades, Online Learning has become a thriving ecology of practitioners, technologies, teaching methods, quality standards — all supported by national organizations such as the Online Learning Consortium. The foundational technology of this flourishing ecology is the Learning Management System, or LMS, and the guiding principles, methods, tools, and quality standards of the field center on asynchronous teaching methods and tools, above all the “course site” hosted in an LMS. The preparation of a properly planned and built online course site is no trivial matter, in part because a well-designed course site that supports asynchronous learning must provide the learner with a complex mix of instructional content, guidance, precise directions, and rich social engagement with instructors and peers.

Instructional Design was brought into Higher Education to facilitate “Online Learning,” but it’s a Trojan Horse that has smuggled a great deal of instructional innovation past the grumpy gatekeepers of the university. The model of Online Education that had evolved in Higher Education, which stressed the thoughtful design and building of course sites in an LMS, requires advanced planning, significant faculty training, and the ongoing support of Instructional Designers and Instructional Technologists. Planning, designing, building and teaching an asynchronous online course requires much more work and skill than teaching a traditional Face to Face (F2F) course, and participating in the process can be transformative for faculty. Instructors face many unfamiliar instructional choices in designing an asynchronous course, and if they are properly trained and supported as they embark upon online teaching, this often leads to growth in their instructional awareness and sophistication. Qualified to become professors by virtue of their specialized doctoral studies, few professors have ever been trained in pedagogy; most simply teach as they were taught. When faculty are being taught “how to teach online,” it is often the first time they have been taught how to teach at all. Through learning how to teach online, faculty often discover that they have become better teachers in every modality.

However, in the sudden urgency of the pandemic, in the scramble to move campuses and courses online, it was nearly impossible for most faculty to take the well-prepared paths to Online Learning that the Instructional Design community had so carefully constructed. As “Emergency Remote Instruction is Not Quality Online Learning,” argues, institutions of Higher Education suddenly moving entire programs online could not provide the careful training, support and planning that accepted approaches to quality online learning require. Convenient access to Zoom and similar technologies offered both institutions and individual faculty a path of least resistance to moving online quickly at a moment of extreme urgency. In many cases, the use of synchronous tools and teaching methods provided the only practical way to move online at short notice, and to do even this much often demanded “heroic levels of creativity, commitment and courage to make it happen.”

During the pandemic, web-based teleconferencing via Zoom and its competitors provided the only practical way to move many thousands of courses and millions of students online with little advance notice. To convert a face to face course meeting directly into a Zoom meeting required far less initial adaptation by both professors and students than any plausible asynchronous option would. Synchronous teaching via Zoom was a “disruptive innovation” in the classic sense because it provided a far cheaper and more expedient way online than received forms of Online Learning. At a moment of unprecedented disruption and crisis, it provided schools and their faculty a way to detour around the lengthy preparation and learning processes involved with conventional forms of Online Learning.

The effect of the pandemic was to massively accelerate the adoption of synchronous technology in Higher Education and the exposure of faculty to the use of web teleconferencing technologies such as Zoom. Though the sheer scale of their use may rise and fall with the pandemic and other factors, a great deal of the practice will remain. The synchronous genie is not going back into the bottle. Too many professors now know all about scheduling Zoom sessions, and too many many professors have learned how to run a synchronous class session. They like the immediacy of communication that web teleconferencing affords, and they have found that it is far easier to lightly adapt an F2F class to a synchronous form than to do the harder, less intuitive work of building and teaching an asynchronous course. Now, as the threat of the pandemic fades and we take stock of what has changed, many faculty have “taught online” without learning how to use the invaluable asynchronous tools and techniques of Online Learning — without needing to expand beyond the practice of teaching as they were once taught.

The synchronous genie is not going back into the bottle.

The extremely rapid rise of synchronous education is profoundly disruptive to online learning as it has evolved in Higher Education because it has allowed tens of thousands of faculty to “teach online” without engaging the methods, tools and pedagogical lessons of asynchronous learning. Asynchronous instruction has long been the primary focus of the online learning field, and we need to take stock of the implications of that fact in light of the shockingly rapid adoption of synchronous technology that we have just witnessed. It would be far too much to claim that online learning in Higher Ed has only been concerned with course sites and silly to imply that people who teach synchronously don’t usually use them in some way. My point is that asynchronous instruction has long been the primary focus of the online learning field, and we need to take stock of the implications of that fact in light of the rise of synchronous teaching. As massive numbers of faculty suddenly adopt synchronous tools and teaching modalities, Instructional Designers in Higher Education face the need to rethink much of how we practice, teach, and measure the quality of online learning in Higher Education

The Synchronous Disruption of Higher Education: “Emergency Remote Teaching.”

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This image from a primary schoolroom features an empty teacher's desk and several student desks with chairs, all setting empty. At the front of the classroom there are two chalkboards, one of which reads "School Closed" and the other of which reads, "Coronavirus."
UNESCO Images.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which forced millions of students and many thousands of professors and teachers online with little warning or preparation, was the greatest mass migration of modalities in the history of education. Among the most disruptive changes of the pandemic period was the mass adoption of synchronous technologies, especially Zoom, as a convenient way of moving Face-to-Face (F2F) classes online. This series of blog posts, The Synchronous Disruption of Higher Education, focuses on the way that the mass adoption of synchronous teaching technologies disrupted many of the methods, models, and assumptions of the field of Online Learning in Higher Education. This post focuses on the concept of “emergency remote teaching,” a term that arose early in the pandemic as a label for the attempt to move Face-to-Face classes online in response to the health threats posed by the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which forced millions of students and many thousands of professors and teachers online with little warning or preparation, was the greatest mass migration of modalities in the history of education.

Though institutions, departments, and individual faculty were found across a broad continuum of preparedness when the pandemic struck, the sudden shutdown of classrooms forced the widespread adoption of learning technologies, especially web-based teleconferencing technologies such as Zoom. This rushed technology adoption often occurred without the full planning, training, and resourcing that was necessary to support and inform it. In many cases Zoom was used by instructors to directly translate F2F class meetings into synchronous online meetings. That course of action made an end run around the established planning and preparation methods of the Online Learning community, but it was called, and widely understood to be, “online learning.” This post looks how the most prominent online learning experts in the country dealt with the disruptions and controversy of the moment, as they tried to distance their own work in online learning from the mass online migration that was unfolding.

As the first waves of campus and classroom closures took place in the early spring of 2020, experts in the field, even while expressing excitement at this “defining moment for online learning,” were beginning to caution that the “remote learning” being thrown together as an emergency response was, of necessity, utterly unlike the properly planned and informed “online learning” they had long practiced, advocated, and sought to legitimize. The problem, as stated in an Educause Review post of March 27, 2020, was that,

Online learning carries a stigma of being lower quality than face-to-face learning, despite research showing otherwise. These hurried moves online by so many institutions at once could seal the perception of online learning as a weak option, when in truth nobody making the transition to online teaching under these circumstances will truly be designing to take full advantage of the affordances and possibilities of the online format.

Among the many helpful contributions made in this article, the chief one was to respond to this situation by coherently describing, “The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning.” That seminal report, made so early in the pandemic, was the work of a bevy of Educause experts that included Charles Hodges, Barb Lockee, Stephanie Moore, Torrey Trust, and Aaron Bond. While articulating the distinction between “online learning” and “emergency remote teaching” the article made clear just why such a distinction was needed.

As the authors explained, most people were not used to the many fine distinctions made in the field between different modalities of online learning, so they tended to lump all “online learning” together in a very crude way – if it was online and it was a class of some kind, then to most people it was simply “online learning.” Given that kind of thinking, and given the persistent stigma carried by online learning in Higher Education in the US, it would make a lot of sense to a lot of people to judge the whole enterprise of “online learning” on the basis of the rushed pandemic experience. As both the supporters and critics of online learning could anticipate, this kind of “experiment” would inevitably demonstrate the inferiority of the rushed “online learning” in comparison to the regularly-scheduled Face-to-Face classes. As the Educause experts pointed out, there were already people arguing for just such an approach, most prominently through an editorial in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Coronavirus and the Great Online-Learning Experiment.” In that article, Jonathan Zimmerman had declared that the mass-movement of courses online provided the perfect time for judging whether true education is even possible via electronic means. The Educause editorial countered this wrongheaded approach by insisting on the distinction between properly planned “online learning” and the rushed “emergency remote teaching” used as a stopgap measure to replace Face-to-Face instruction.

Jennifer Mathes of the Online Learning Consortium and other experts in the field rallied around the Educause Editorial’s distinction between “emergency remote teaching” and (proper) “online learning.” Though she referenced a set of established, more technical E-Learning Definitions by John Sener that the OLC had adopted in 2015, it is significant to note that she felt the need to go beyond them in a decisive fashion. The main purpose of the 2025 E-Learning definitions had been to distinguish carefully between related modalities of instruction; in that context, an “Online Course” was being differentiated from a “Blended Online Course” as well as from a “Blended Classroom Course” and a “Flexible Mode Course.” However, five years later, Mathes’ primary concern was to differentiate between “online learning” and “emergency remote teaching,” both of which technically conformed to the 2015 definitions of an online course, which defined it as a course in which, “all course activity is done online; there are no required face-to-face sessions within the course and no requirements for on-campus activity.”

Instead of offering the earlier modality-centered definitions of what constitutes an “online course,” Mathes, and the expert consensus in the field, had reacted to the online rush of the pandemic by creating definitions of “online learning” that centered on quality. She argued that what made something “online learning” was not the technologies involved but instead the degree of planning, resourcing, and expertise that informed and supported the effort. According to her exacting definition, “Online learning uses the internet as a delivery modality to offer thoughtfully designed, quality, student-focused learning experiences, built on proven best practices that create effective interactions between learners, peers, instructors, and content.”

“Online learning uses the internet as a delivery modality to offer thoughtfully designed, quality, student-focused learning experiences, built on proven best practices that create effective interactions between learners, peers, instructors, and content.”

Jennifer Mathes, OLC

Mathes’ definition of online learning is packed tight with terms and phrases that evoke foundational concepts in the field of e-learning. Notice that Mathes, like other practitioners in the field, wanted to help institutions and professors make the very best of a bad situation, while refusing to dilute their idealism concerning what online education is and could be. However, the desire to protect the reputation of (true, excellent) online learning and (excusable) emergency remote instruction created a more idealistic, exalted conception of online education than had been accepted before the pandemic, partly in response to the reality that so much of the actual online teaching and learning was not of the highest quality. What Mathes’ work did not do was to articulate the reality that the ideas about course quality, proven best practices, and even the nature of the “interactions between learners, peers, instructors, and content” were rooted in the collective wisdom of the Instructional Design community, and just as certainly, rooted in the historic development of “online education” as centered in asynchronous tools such as the LMS and the “course site.” Nearly everything about the OLC’s carefully curated wisdom regarding quality online learning relates to that deeply textual world, and it was that realm of practice that the forced online migration had bypassed, skipped right over through the use of Zoom to attempt the direct translation of classroom meeting into online meeting.

The need to distinguish between (true) online learning and (excusable) emergency remote instruction created a more idealistic, exalted conception of online education than had been accepted before the pandemic.

The surge of the Omicron variant in early 2022 forced many institutions to move courses online again, which restarted acrimonious debates about “online learning.” Once again, there was an attempt to distance the rushed efforts of that response from proper “online learning,” but this time the definitions became much clearer, as captured in the most authoritative pronouncement on the subject of recent months, a February 8, 2022 joint composition by the members of the National Council for Online Education, an organization that brings together several prominent national organizations, including the Online Learning Consortium. This statement reiterates that “Emergency Remote Instruction is Not Quality Online Learning,” in an effort to combat the “inaccurate use of terminology that has led to confusion for students, their families, faculty, administrators, policy makers, members of the press and the public at large.” In other words, the backlash against “emergency remote instruction” is still hurting legitimate “quality online learning” in the debates within schools, among stakeholders, and within the larger public discussion. Initially, the report strikes a similar tone to the reports of 2020 in attributing the basic difference between “remote” and “online” instruction to “preparation and planning.” However, the new definitions of “emergency remote learning” offered as part of this statement are far more specific than than the statements from two years before. As captured in the new definition of “remote learning,” the problem with “remote learning,” is that it comes down to faculty rushing to recreate the in-person classroom experience, via synchronous class meetings, using Zoom. As the complete definition states,

Remote learning is an emergency measure used to assure continuity of learning. It involves taking a course that was designed for the face-to-face classroom and moving it quickly into a distance learning modality (usually synchronous and held via web-conferencing tools, such as Zoom). Typically, the aim is an attempt to replicate the in-person classroom experience. Most faculty have too little training, support or time to effectively pivot their face-to-face course to one we would characterize as high-quality online learning.As the new definition states, remote learning involves the “quick” movement of a class planned as F2F online, (usually synchronous and held via web-conferencing tools, such as Zoom).

This definition of “remote learning” finally makes clear a dawning realization in the field; that it was above all the use of Zoom by faculty to try to directly translate a classroom experience into an online meeting experience that was the essence of “emergency remote teaching.” That method, now within the technical reach of nearly everyone with an internet connection, violated every tenet of the gathered wisdom of the field. It neatly circumvented the technologies, the methods, the quality standards, the training programs and the educational philosophies provided by the Online Learning leaders in Higher Education. It was this statement of early 2022, born out of the hard experience of the pandemic, that finally brought clarity to the crisis of the moment, a crisis in which the leadership of online learning in higher education was being bypassed almost completely by a vast new wave of practitioners, largely untutored in the collective wisdom of the field, practitioners whose very uneven results were identified firmly with “online learning” in the minds of the public and in the perceptions of crucial constituencies.

Through 2020 and 2021, the use of “emergency remote teaching” or similar phrases to describe the rushed and under-resourced movement of F2F classes online was of vital importance to leaders in Online Learning in Higher Education, in part because of the need to the established practices of the field from the urgent triage efforts that were moving courses and programs online during the pandemic. It is only in early 2022 that public statements employing this firm begin to clarify that that at the heart of the disruptive threat posed by “emergency remote teaching” was the use of Zoom to move classes online.