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

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.