The Five Pillars of Quality Digital Learning

In early March 2020, COVID-19 was surging through New York City and the City Colleges of New York had yet to shut down. Students—many of whom were commuters—were scared for their health and fearful that they would bring the virus home to vulnerable family members.

They knew private colleges in the area were shutting down and evacuating their dorms. One student remembers “waiting for any sort of confirmation that our health and safety matters and that we should stop coming in for classes.” Students pulled together a petition with more than 70,000 signatures. They organized a protest. And they waited and waited to hear if the college would close its doors.

Finally, the governor announced on March 11 that the college would pivot to virtual learning.¹

Then, things went very fast. In the dorms, “people were banging on their doors. Telling them, you have to get out. You have to leave in a couple of days. You have to pack up your stuff or it will be moved for you,’” confided a student at the time. Many students did not have any place to go and many more felt scared to go anywhere in the face of a raging pandemic. And then they had to figure out how to learn in a totally different way.

In a matter of days, faculty pivoted to offering course material online. Most had little or no training in distance learning. Many simply moved their lecture-style classes onto Zoom while struggling to learn how to use their college's online learning management system or recreate their course another way. One student told us, “when everything shut down, it kind of felt like the teachers shut down. And it was honestly really difficult finishing up our classes just because everyone went home. Teachers went home. No one knew what they were doing. So everything just kind of fell apart.”

Students and faculty finished the spring term as best they could. During the summer months, as the pandemic continued to grip the nation, many institutions designed training to equip faculty for the challenges that the following full semesters of online learning would bring. Even so, students reported little improvement from the spring semester despite faculty feeling more confident in their abilities.² It was a time of crisis management: for administrators, for faculty, for staff, and for students.

Now, the immediacy of the crisis is over. As the nation enters a new phase of recovery, colleges will begin to return to in-person learning. At the same time, many colleges and faculty want to make the most of the investment they made in online learning. Some students are also considering keeping some portion of their education online.³ Colleges and universities across the nation who were newer to online education can pause and reflect on how they can offer equitable, high-quality online education outside of crisis mode. By learning from this disaster, we can make higher education more flexible, resilient, and student-focused into the future.

Prior to the pandemic, the number of students taking online classes was steadily increasing, as were the number of colleges offering online courses.⁴ At the same time, the higher education student population as a whole became increasingly diverse, with more students of color, adult students, low-income and first-generation students, and students with dependents enrolled than ever before.⁵ Many of these students choose to take online courses because they work better with their responsibilities.

Research suggests that online courses are typically about as good as comparable in-person courses. But the evidence also shows that some student populations, including first-generation and academically at-risk learners, are especially vulnerable to poorly-designed online programs.⁶ In one study of California Community College students, students who took online classes were more likely to have to retake a course.⁷ The equity gaps that persist across the higher education system are also prevalent across online classes.⁸ In Washington State, a study examining the performance gap between in-person and online classes found that males, students with lower GPAs, and Black students experienced the greatest declines in academic performance while online.⁹ Researchers found similar results in a study on Virginia community college students.¹⁰

Research also shows what does work for online learning.¹¹ Several decades of practice, millions of online learners, and organizations like the nonprofit Quality Matters have synthesized that knowledge into best practices that should guide educators, institutional leaders, and policymakers in making the post-COVID landscape of online learning effective for all. This report combines those insights with a series of nine student focus groups and 25 interviews with digital learning experts across the country, ranging from instructional designers to digital learning. We talked to 44 college students – sophomores, juniors, and seniors from across the country – in October 2020 about their experiences with online learning since the Covid-19 pandemic happened. These focus groups were conducted virtually over Zoom and were sixty to ninety minutes each.

The pandemic was, in some ways, a sneak preview of higher education’s future, one in which technology-mediated and -enabled education is ubiquitous, but with the potential for deep inequities in access to high-quality learning. This report describes some of the ways in which higher education succeeded and fell short during the remarkable 2020–21 year of distance learning. It proposes a trio of federal policy changes to build the ecosystem needed for online learning to ensure it is more equitable for students of color and low-income students, and to improve the quality for everyone.

In many ways, teaching well online is similar to quality teaching in person. Classes of any kind need to be well-organized with clear objectives, regular feedback, and opportunities for students to connect with one another. But while technology can make education more affordable and accessible, students learning at a distance lack access to many of the informal, interpersonal, and place-based benefits of on-campus learning communities. That makes some elements of class design and engagement especially important online. It is crucial that online courses:

1. Implement an organized class structure and clear communication,
2. Delineate clear and aligned learning objectives,
3. Provide regular feedback,
4. Build on supportive technology, and
5. Support student connection and community

As we learned during the pandemic, each of these pillars have elements that practitioners and policymakers should be mindful of in building a digital college infrastructure for all.¹²