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
Clark on Instruction 