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Embracing a new normal in ourselves and communities

COVID-19 restrictions have gone on long enough to establish new habits. So what do we want to keep doing and stop doing, both individually and as a community?

By Associate Professor Terry Bowles , University of Melbourne

Published 25 May 2020

As COVID-19 restrictions are gradually lifted across Australia and we emerge from months of isolation, it’s important to note that we have passed the threshold of time required to establish new habits .

Research shows that it takes between 30 and 60 days to establish a new habit or to stop a bad habit, intentionally or coincidentally. That means the things we have been doing, that we didn’t do before, will be easy to keep doing, if they are good for us.

Similarly, if we started or expanded on unhelpful or unhealthy behaviours while in isolation it will be hard to revert back to pre-isolation levels, though the feeling that we are entering a new normal may for some make it easier to break any negative habits we may have fallen into.

We have the opportunity then to look back before we look forward and ask some important questions around improving health and wellbeing for ourselves and those around us:

The world is a classroom

What am I now doing that I want to continue doing?

What do I want to stop doing that I’ve now started doing?

What behaviours that I did before isolation, that I stopped, do I want to not take up again?

What new behaviours, that I’ve never done before, do I now want to begin?

The COVID-19 experience will have taught people different things, but for almost all of us it has shown than we can quickly change our daily routines.

Some of us slept more, watched more TV, played more games or engaged more on social media; some cooked more, engaged more with those they live with, found creative ways to exercise and work from home, spent less time in cars, and maybe drank less alcohol or drank more.

What this means is that the experience has allowed us to take two big ideas into the rest of our lives:

As a society we have the capacity to listen to expert advice and change remarkably rapidly

As individuals we can listen to expert advice and change parts of our lives remarkably quickly, sometimes for good but also sometimes for bad

Managing your family’s cabin fever

If we consider what life was like before COVID-19 and compare that with our experience during isolation, we can start to re-inhabit our possible new lives and new selves.

With a little bit of reflection, planning and action we can come out of the COVID-19 experience with a more adaptive mindset. This will help us to buffer the shock of new challenges and increase our sense of control over our lives, and allow us to directly focus on life’s opportunities and possibilities.

The key task now, regardless of our initial reactions to the restored freedoms after isolation, is to curb impulsive action and make a benefit of the experience by carefully developing new positive habits .

For many people this won’t be easy, especially for those who have lost work, income, livelihoods, stability and especially those who have lost loved ones. For many, the experience of COVID-19 is coupled with profound grief .

People in this situation may not have the necessary resources to generate a “positive bump” from the easing of restrictions as others will. They may need support from family and friends, their community and government.

Sometimes we need to rest a while with sadness and grief and eventually its impact subsides or prompts us to seek professional help in managing our negative emotions, thoughts and behaviours. Eventually, a new outlook on life and new actions can emerge.

How do we teach students about their wellbeing online?

The point is not to get stuck but to keep working through, towards what the future may bring, even if only tomorrow, with little steps and little plans. While we may not be all-in-this-together given the extreme loss some of us have experienced, we can still empathise, share their grief and assist them.

At a societal level we have by necessity had to operate on an unusually level playing field in the sense that we’ve all been in this isolation together.

And while our circumstances are different, we are also together in the recovery and the changes it may bring , whether it is in the economy, our social system, our political institutions or the way we care for the environment. We may need to learn new ways to create processes of social cooperation.

But if individually we can start with just one or two good new actions or behaviours we can each build these into positive habits. These can help to make us more adaptable and resilient , and help us plan a small way into the future. We can then have confidence in our choices and plans and help others obtain the assistance they need.

That way we will all be in a better place in our new communities.

Banner: Jose Carlo Ichiro/Unsplash

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Associate Professor Terry Bowles

Educational and Developmental Psychology, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne

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Adapting to the culture of ‘new normal’: an emerging response to COVID-19

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Jeff Clyde G Corpuz, Adapting to the culture of ‘new normal’: an emerging response to COVID-19, Journal of Public Health , Volume 43, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages e344–e345, https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdab057

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A year after COVID-19 pandemic has emerged, we have suddenly been forced to adapt to the ‘new normal’: work-from-home setting, parents home-schooling their children in a new blended learning setting, lockdown and quarantine, and the mandatory wearing of face mask and face shields in public. For many, 2020 has already been earmarked as ‘the worst’ year in the 21st century. Ripples from the current situation have spread into the personal, social, economic and spiritual spheres. Is this new normal really new or is it a reiteration of the old? A recent correspondence published in this journal rightly pointed out the involvement of a ‘supportive’ government, ‘creative’ church and an ‘adaptive’ public in the so-called culture. However, I argue that adapting to the ‘new normal’ can greatly affect the future. I would carefully suggest that we examine the context and the location of culture in which adaptations are needed.

To live in the world is to adapt constantly. A year after COVID-19 pandemic has emerged, we have suddenly been forced to adapt to the ‘new normal’: work-from-home setting, parents home-schooling their children in a new blended learning setting, lockdown and quarantine, and the mandatory wearing of face mask and face shields in public. For many, 2020 has already been earmarked as ‘the worst’ year in the 21st century. 1 Ripples from the current situation have spread into the personal, social, economic and spiritual spheres. Is this new normal really new or is it a reiteration of the old? A recent correspondence published in this journal rightly pointed out the involvement of a ‘supportive’ government, ‘creative’ church and an ‘adaptive’ public in the so-called culture. 2 However, I argue that adapting to the ‘new normal’ can greatly affect the future. I would carefully suggest that we examine the context and the location of culture in which adaptations are needed.

The term ‘new normal’ first appeared during the 2008 financial crisis to refer to the dramatic economic, cultural and social transformations that caused precariousness and social unrest, impacting collective perceptions and individual lifestyles. 3 This term has been used again during the COVID-19 pandemic to point out how it has transformed essential aspects of human life. Cultural theorists argue that there is an interplay between culture and both personal feelings (powerlessness) and information consumption (conspiracy theories) during times of crisis. 4 Nonetheless, it is up to us to adapt to the challenges of current pandemic and similar crises, and whether we respond positively or negatively can greatly affect our personal and social lives. Indeed, there are many lessons we can learn from this crisis that can be used in building a better society. How we open to change will depend our capacity to adapt, to manage resilience in the face of adversity, flexibility and creativity without forcing us to make changes. As long as the world has not found a safe and effective vaccine, we may have to adjust to a new normal as people get back to work, school and a more normal life. As such, ‘we have reached the end of the beginning. New conventions, rituals, images and narratives will no doubt emerge, so there will be more work for cultural sociology before we get to the beginning of the end’. 5

Now, a year after COVID-19, we are starting to see a way to restore health, economies and societies together despite the new coronavirus strain. In the face of global crisis, we need to improvise, adapt and overcome. The new normal is still emerging, so I think that our immediate focus should be to tackle the complex problems that have emerged from the pandemic by highlighting resilience, recovery and restructuring (the new three Rs). The World Health Organization states that ‘recognizing that the virus will be with us for a long time, governments should also use this opportunity to invest in health systems, which can benefit all populations beyond COVID-19, as well as prepare for future public health emergencies’. 6 There may be little to gain from the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is important that the public should keep in mind that no one is being left behind. When the COVID-19 pandemic is over, the best of our new normal will survive to enrich our lives and our work in the future.

No funding was received for this paper.

UNESCO . A year after coronavirus: an inclusive ‘new normal’. https://en.unesco.org/news/year-after-coronavirus-inclusive-new-normal . (12 February 2021, date last accessed) .

Cordero DA . To stop or not to stop ‘culture’: determining the essential behavior of the government, church and public in fighting against COVID-19 . J Public Health (Oxf) 2021 . doi: 10.1093/pubmed/fdab026 .

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El-Erian MA . Navigating the New Normal in Industrial Countries . Washington, D.C. : International Monetary Fund , 2010 .

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Alexander JC , Smith P . COVID-19 and symbolic action: global pandemic as code, narrative, and cultural performance . Am J Cult Sociol 2020 ; 8 : 263 – 9 .

Biddlestone M , Green R , Douglas KM . Cultural orientation, power, belief in conspiracy theories, and intentions to reduce the spread of COVID-19 . Br J Soc Psychol 2020 ; 59 ( 3 ): 663 – 73 .

World Health Organization . From the “new normal” to a “new future”: A sustainable response to COVID-19. 13 October 2020 . https: // www.who.int/westernpacific/news/commentaries/detail-hq/from-the-new-normal-to-a-new-future-a-sustainable-response-to-covid-19 . (12 February 2021, date last accessed) .

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Embracing Change: Creating a New Normal

September 11, 2020 - 5 minute read

Due to COVID-19, we have been thrust into a world of online learning, remote working, and socially distanced living. As I write this, I sit in my family room at my makeshift desk, finishing a full day of virtual meetings, emails, and online chats.  My husband is on the couch, preparing his online acting and directing courses. My children are in their bedrooms, completing online college courses.  This shift to remote working and learning has brought some unforeseen benefits. We have gained more time in our days with no commute to work or school.  We can integrate our work responsibilities with home responsibilities throughout the day.  We have increased flexibility with our personal schedules.  Yet, we also miss the face-to-face connections with students, colleagues, and friends, and the opportunity to teach in a physical classroom setting, engaging in face to face collaboration. Our in-person world has become a virtual world.  I wonder how this new normal will forever shift our social norms.  Will we really go back to the way things were before COVID-19?  

Change  

For many of us, the transition to online teaching and remote working happened in a matter of days.  It was traumatic, jarring, and chaotic. As human beings, we often find change difficult.  Change interrupts well-established patterns of behavior and calls for new patterns to be developed (Ford, Ford & D’Amelio, 2008).  Resistance to change is a well-documented phenomenon. Sometimes we fear the unsettling chaos that can come with change.  Sometimes we fear not being the expert and starting over as a novice.  Sometimes, we simply prefer what is familiar (Ford, Ford & D’Amelio, 2008).  While organizational change can be disruptive and chaotic, it can also be a valuable, creative process.  The truth is, if your organization is to survive, change is inevitable.  Negative entropy is an organizational theory that describes how systems are naturally prone to disorder and demise, yet, through evolution and adaptation, organizations can work to slow this process and ensure their viability (Mumby & Kuhn, 2019).   Established systems are valuable since they organize our work, streamline processes, and ensure quality.  However, when we allow our status quo systems to create silos and insulate us from the needs of outside constituents (our students), it stagnates innovation and seals our fate of becoming irrelevant.  Change is difficult but needed.  It upsets the flow of operations but opens the opportunity for improvement.  It can bring chaos, but it can also bring progress. For me, the planner, organizer, detailed person, I run from change.  Nevertheless, when I love the system more than I value meeting the changing needs of those I serve, I have lost touch with what my work is really about – serving others. 

When to Change

It takes wisdom to know when to bring change to an organization. It requires looking externally at the needs of your students and families.  How have their lives changed since March 2020 when COVID-19 disrupted our lives? Do families prefer online learning because of self-paced learning and flexible schedules?  What do students need now after months of social isolation?  Will families expect more choices in their child’s education? These are all possibilities.  Listening to students and families, evaluating their feedback, and being open to adapting will be a valuable way to serve students and families.   It also requires looking internally at the capacity for change within your school and assessing the needs of your team to support change.  Balancing the external needs of students and families and the internal needs of the team is a critical step in determining the time for change. 

How to Change

It takes wisdom to assess and implement a successful process for change.  It is crucial to include multiple perspectives, since many details need to be examined.  The impact on individual members should be considered and a plan for support provided. The leader should initiate open, transparent communication with the team to articulate the need for change, and demonstrate a sense of calm, purposeful direction that leads the team through the process (Bague, Cava & Hopkinson, 2020).  Change is risky and messy.  It should not be undertaken without intentional consideration of all the elements and support provided for those adjusting to a new reality, but navigating through it can yield great, innovative results. 

Open to Change

The beauty of change is that it brings new possibilities.  The innovation and development in online teaching has exploded.  As with anything implemented in response to a significant and sudden crisis, not all online education has been excellent.  We need to start searching for the gems and build on those positives.  I want to tell you that I have a roadmap for the post COVID-19 student, but I do not.  What we can do is keep evaluating, questioning, and searching for ways we can adjust our teaching to meet the needs of our students and families.  The world has been shaken up dramatically and how the pieces all settle is yet to be determined, but I predict it will be different.   Will you be ready and willing to change?

Bague, H., Cava, J., & Hopkinson, M. (2020).  "Applying Past Leadership Lessons to the Coronavirus Pandemic". McKinsey Insights , March 25, 2020.

Ford, J. D., Ford, L. W., & D’Amelio, A. (2008).  "Resistance to Change: The Rest of the Story".   Academy of Management Review , Vol. 33, No. 2,  364-377.

Mumby, D. K., & Kuhn, T. R. (2019) Organizational Communication: A Critical Introduction (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. ISBN: 978-1-4833-1706-9

Professor Heather Vezner first came to Concordia in 2009 as the Field Experience Coordinator and TPA Assistant Coordinator. From 2011-2015 she served as Director of Student Teaching and has most recently become Director of Preliminary Teacher Credential Programs.

Prior to coming to Concordia, Professor Vezner was an early childhood educator and administrator, an elementary teacher, and a parent educator for a grant-funded early education program. Professor Vezner has presented at numerous conferences on topics such as literacy development, creative dramatics, music and movement, and early childhood curriculum.

Professor Vezner is currently working on a doctorate in Organizational Leadership.

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Coming to Terms With a New Normal: Recovery, Resilience, and Opportunities in a Post–COVID-19 World

Daryl oakes.

a Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA

b Associate Dean, Post Graduate Medical Education, Stanford Center for Continuing Medical Education, Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford, CA

Emily Methangkool

c Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused enormous upheaval requiring numerous changes and adjustments not only in our personal lives but also in our professional worlds. As we begin to imagine a future beyond the immediate crisis caused by COVID-19, we have an opportunity to use this moment of transition and disruption to promote positive change and innovation in our professional environments and professional communities. A reflection on the changes brought by the pandemic, seen in the context of several forces that have been challenging traditional professional structures in the past several decades, provides some insight into the opportunities that this moment offers to create a new norm and address long-standing issues faced by our professional anesthesiology societies.

The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked profound global upheaval and disruption. Unfortunately, with new rapidly spreading viral variants, it appears that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is on its way to becoming an endemic disease that indefinitely will be with us. 1 Similarly, it is increasingly evident that, rather than coming to a definitive resolution, the end to the pandemic will be more of a slow evolution into a new normal. We are now left to decide how we will respond to these changes: Which changes will we embrace as new opportunities, and which changes, because they threaten systems we value, will we need to manage with innovative solutions?

One question is how our professional societies and organizations in anesthesiology will respond to the changes brought on by the pandemic. This moment of cultural disruption provides a unique opportunity to reexamine, and possibly reenvision, the way our anesthesiology professional societies are structured, how they engage with their members, and how they will lead our professional communities going forward.

The pandemic has accelerated the impact of several on-going challenges to the traditional models for anesthesiology societies and professional organizations. 2 Among the forces for change that have been enhanced by the pandemic are the following: new technologic developments and enhanced adoption of digital technologies by physicians; an increased awareness and attention to the need to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in our professional environments; and the limitations of traditional financial structures for our professional organizations. Although many of these forces have been developing during the last decade or so, the pandemic has made these pressures even more acute. It now is critical that we recognize fully, both their impact on our organizations and the opportunities they present for enhancing our professional institutions.

Expanding Digital Technologies and the Decentralization of Medical Information

The decentralization of information caused by digital technologies presents a significant challenge to the traditional structure of professional anesthesiology societies. Prior to the pandemic, national society meetings already were beginning to experience competition for their professional audiences from a growing variety of online educational offerings. In addition, social network platforms have democratized professional discourse and offered alternative mechanisms, outside of professional societies, for the dissemination of new research, publications, or guidelines, for the sharing of educational programming such as webinars, podcasts, or “tweetorials,” and for the creation of professional networks. 3 , 4 These new forums are challenging the traditional role of national societies as the primary platforms for these professional exchanges.

The pandemic and the restrictions it has brought on social contact and travel have resulted in a massive and rapid adoption of digital technology. The urgent need for timely information and educational content about COVID-19 brought an enormous volume of physicians to online platforms, including many physicians who previously never had interacted with virtual forums. As the pandemic has progressed, it appears that this enhanced engagement with online professional activity does not appear to be waning. The experience of D.O.’s continuing medical education office at Stanford University suggests that engagement with online and virtual education is persisting, and, even a year or so in, remains at relatively high levels. This may be due to the relative ease of use, decreased time commitment, and flexibility inherent in online education that make it increasingly attractive to physicians with an ever-increasing clinical and professional workload.

Although the new digital professional environment is threatening the traditional ways our professional societies “do business,” it also provides an important opportunity for these organizations to innovate and evolve. By embracing these technologies, societies potentially can enhance engagement with their members and even draw new, previously untapped, physician populations into our organizations. For example, the conversion of historically in-person conferences to virtual platforms during the pandemic allowed many professionals (eg, trainees, junior faculty, private practice physicians, and physicians managing childcare responsibilities), who previously had not engaged in national in-person meetings due to cost constraints, work conflicts, and personal responsibilities, to engage directly with the larger professional community through online programming, social media, and virtual meetings.

This potential for enhanced engagement was reflected in the experience of many anesthesiology societies when they converted their annual meetings to virtual platforms this past year. Even with limited experience in virtual programming, many annual conferences hosted highly successful virtual meetings. Most programs attracted similar numbers of attendees, and some even had significant increases in the numbers of attendees, compared with previous in-person conferences. The Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists’ (SCA) annual meeting, for example, had slightly increased attendance overall, with a doubling of attendance at the smaller Thoracic Anesthesia Society component meeting.

Although many anesthesiology societies are eager to return to in-person and “back-to-normal” programming, the option of virtual conferencing and the new adoption of digital platforms raises an interesting debate regarding the future of the in-person professional conference. 5 Virtual conferences, although not perfect, allow for the participation of a broader audience, have a lower carbon footprint, offer decreased costs for participants (eg, lower registration fees, no travel expenses), and lower financial risk for the hosting organization. Although the loss of serendipitous interaction of in-person events is a concern for many, online platforms can open the door to virtual networking and collaborations that can be continued and sustained, through online technologies, between meetings. These connections made online are no less valuable as they often lead to future professional collaborations. Recognizing this, several anesthesiology societies have started to use these online community forums to engage their members (eg, the American Society of Anesthesiologists' ASA Community, the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists' SCA DocMatter, the Association of University Anesthesiologists' AUA DocMatter).

If anesthesiology societies want to stay relevant and compete in the new digital information environment, we will need to integrate online strategies and virtual platforms into our educational and professional offerings. This may mean that national societies offer hybrid options for national meetings or maybe develop more robust year-round online activities to increase member engagement. Or, perhaps, professional societies should rethink the purpose and structure of in-person meetings to enhance and fully harness the benefits of an on-site audience.

To warrant the time and expense of traveling, in-person meetings may need to be more intentional about fostering direct participation, interaction, and inclusion of all attendees. Groups that may have felt like “outsiders” at these meetings in the past (eg, women, underrepresented minorities, private practice physicians) might be more likely to attend in-person programs that create a meaningful and inclusive experience for them. For instance, Salem et al. demonstrated that small changes in the management of question-and-answer sessions at professional conferences (ie, enhancing the number of women moderators and selecting women to ask the first question) significantly decreased sex discrepancies in who asks questions and speaks in these forums at national meetings. 6

Although many directions can be taken, it is clear that digital technologies are reshaping how we interact professionally and, going forward, professional societies will need to rethink their traditional programming and mechanisms of interacting with professional membership.

Pressure to Address Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

A second challenge to the “old normal” that the pandemic has highlighted is an increasing dissatisfaction with the lack of racial, gender, and age diversity in many of our professional specialties and in our professional societies. Already-existing professional gender disparities in medicine were increased further by the pandemic. The closure of schools and the related increased childcare responsibilities disproportionately affected women physicians, especially those early in their career, and forced large numbers of women to decrease their professional work or even to exit the job market. 7 Overall, employment statistics during the pandemic demonstrated such dramatic job loss among women in all sectors—and notably highest for non-White and minority group women—that the economic recession associated with the pandemic has been labeled a “she-cession.” 8 In addition, the reported rates of psychologic distress during the pandemic were notably higher for women, and for women with children, were 1.5-to-2 times that reported by men (either with or without children). 9 Even before COVID-19, women in medicine were noted to have higher rates of burnout and depression than men and 130% higher rates of suicide than the general population. COVID-19 has further accentuated the challenges faced by the female physician workforce. 10

Professional advancement of women in medicine also has been significantly and negatively affected by the pandemic. Several studies have demonstrated that gender disparities in publication increased dramatically during the pandemic. 11 , 12 This further expansion of the existing historic gender gap in publication has significant, long-lasting professional implications for women. Diminished productivity during the pandemic could hamper women for decades as they compete for grant opportunities and pursue academic advancement against male peers who had unchanged or even augmented productivity during this time.

The impact of the pandemic on both gender and racial disparities has brought renewed scrutiny to issues of representation and diversity in our professional organizations. In anesthesiology, similar to many other medical fields, leadership in professional societies historically has been predominantly male, White, older, and academic. Deliberate efforts to promote diversity in our organizations clearly are needed if we are going to create communities that are attractive to women and underrepresented minorities. In addition, our professional societies need to be more responsive to other important professional demographic groups, such as younger physicians (an estimated 25% of anesthesiologists are <40 years old) 13 and private practice physicians. In particular, the concerns and interests of these groups must be deliberately addressed and attended to by leadership at the highest level of these professional societies. For example, the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists has created 2 “early-career” director positions, both of whom are full voting members of the SCA Board of Directors and can provide valuable insights from the perspective of members who typically are not included in leadership. Other professional societies should consider undertaking concerted, visible efforts to engage members of private practice and early-career physicians to broaden their reach and bring new perspectives and talent into our specialty overall.

Another potential way for societies to appeal to a broader professional community is to use special interest groups within the society structure. For example, the SCA Women in Cardiothoracic Anesthesiology (WICTA) special interest group has enhanced engagement with women in cardiothoracic anesthesiology by building a specific community for women within the society. WICTA has synergized with SCA membership engagement efforts by providing a pathway for women, many of whom did not previously interact with the SCA, to become active members and dedicated contributors to the society activities. Not only has this model been used successfully by several anesthesiology societies (eg, American Society of Regional Anesthesia's Women in Regional Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, Society of Critical Care Medicine's Women in Critical Care Medicine, and ASA's Committee on Women Anesthesiologists), it could be used for other demographic groups as well. Private practice physicians or early-career physicians, for instance, might be more inclined to join our professional societies if they had their own special interest group, within the society, to support their unique professional interests.

In addition, societies can improve engagement with their professional communities by making intentional efforts to expand the demographic groups represented in their leadership committees, speaker panels, guidelines committees, professional awards, and research grant recipients. By ensuring all members of our professional community are represented in our national society forums, our professional societies can increase their relevance, reach and impact on our professional communities.

Shifting Financial Environment

Furthermore, the pandemic has challenged the traditional financial models for our professional societies. The historic reliance on annual meeting registration as a major revenue source became a significant liability during the pandemic when many annual meetings were cancelled. New alternative financial models to support professional society work not only may address the constraints of this current model but also may allow professional societies to explore new roles that increase their relevance. These new financial models could include a shift toward online, fee-based educational offerings or networking opportunities that could help societies decrease their reliance on annual meeting registration. In addition, societies may need to consider new roles, such as legislative and professional regulatory advocacy. Although many societies are not able to engage in political advocacy due to nonprofit status, today's professional environment with changing financial structures, new payment models, and competition from nonphysician providers is making these issues increasingly important to their members. By reexamining the roles that our professional anesthesiology societies take in our professional communities, we may be able to be more impactful, relevant, and more attractive to a wider audience of professional colleagues.

The Road Forward: Creating a New and Better Normal

The pandemic has brought enormous changes to our world. Although we often assume recovery means a return to the “normal” of the past, perhaps we should consider using this moment to create a “new and better normal.” Change, though sometimes difficult, also brings an opportunity for innovation. So, before we rush to “return to normal,” perhaps we should pause, take stock of where we are, and consider what is working in our professional environments and what needs a new approach.

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Personal Health

When Life Throws You Curveballs, Embrace the ‘New Normal’

For patients with life-altering illnesses or anyone just getting older, it helps to roll with the punches and make the best of the here and now.

By Jane E. Brody

Just when I needed it most, I learned a valuable life lesson from Lynda Wolters, who has a cancer that is currently incurable, diagnosed just after her 49th birthday. As an Idaho farm girl used to hard work, Ms. Wolters led a healthy life, enjoying ballroom dancing, horseback riding, rafting and hiking when not at work at a law firm. Then, as she wrote in her recently published book, “Voices of Cancer”:

“Everything changes with cancer — everything. Life will never be the same again, even on the smallest of levels, something will be forever different. There is no going back to who you once were, so embrace it and grow from it and with it. Find the new you in your new space and make it wonderful.”

I’ve long been a stubbornly independent do-it-yourself person who rails against any infirmity that gets in the way of my usual activities. For jobs I think I should be able to do myself, I typically resist asking for help. But in reading this book, I finally understand the importance of accepting and adjusting to a “new normal” now that my aging, arthritic body rebels against activities I once did with ease. Like sweeping and bagging the leaves around my house, tending my garden, preparing a meal for company, hosting house guests, walking several miles, even visiting a museum for more than an hour.

I now fully understand that a successful life is not necessarily the perfect one I had imagined it would be as I got older. Rather, it’s a life that rolls with the punches, adapts to changing circumstances, and makes the best of the here and now. It’s a lesson I should have learned decades ago. I should not be measuring myself against some ideal or what might have been.

Instead, I must learn to accept my limitations, ask for help when I need it, and pursue only those activities I can handle with little or no pain. I must learn to say “no” when I know in my heart that “yes” would be a miserable mistake. Pride, I’m beginning to understand, really does go before a fall. (Of course, I realize that accepting the chronic limitations of arthritis, however debilitating, is not the same as facing a deadly disease.)

It’s not as if I never knew people who had to reinvent themselves when a serious health problem threw a monkey wrench into their life plans. I had interviewed Dr. Wendy S. Harpham in 2003 when her first book, “Diagnosis: Cancer,” was published. Dr. Harpham was 36 years old, a mother of three very young children with a private practice in internal medicine — a career she loved — when she learned she had a life-threatening lymphoma with no established cure. Repeated recurrences and their debilitating treatments forced her to close her practice, then prompted her to start a second career writing books to help people and their loved ones cope with cancer as best as their disease allowed.

“When my cancer came back and my prognosis worsened, I chose to deal with the uncertainty by doing the best I could today, each day, living as fully as possible within the limits of my survival,” said Dr. Harpham, who is now 65 and beyond thrilled to be a much engaged grandmother of five. “I had to learn to accept my limits. But first I had to grieve what I lost — my practice, my stamina, my ability to multitask — before I could move on and embrace what remained.”

In a column she wrote for Oncology Times , Dr. Harpham suggested that patients aim to create “a new normal for now ” to help them deal with unwanted changes in healthy and hopeful ways. That means establishing routines that enable them to get through the day, tailoring their expectations in ways that minimize anxiety and unpleasant surprises.

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The “new normal” in education

• Viewpoints/ Controversies
• Published: 24 November 2020
• Volume 51 , pages 3–14, ( 2021 )

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• José Augusto Pacheco   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4623-6898 1  

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Effects rippling from the Covid 19 emergency include changes in the personal, social, and economic spheres. Are there continuities as well? Based on a literature review (primarily of UNESCO and OECD publications and their critics), the following question is posed: How can one resist the slide into passive technologization and seize the possibility of achieving a responsive, ethical, humane, and international-transformational approach to education? Technologization, while an ongoing and evidently ever-intensifying tendency, is not without its critics, especially those associated with the humanistic tradition in education. This is more apparent now that curriculum is being conceived as a complicated conversation. In a complex and unequal world, the well-being of students requires diverse and even conflicting visions of the world, its problems, and the forms of knowledge we study to address them.

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From the past, we might find our way to a future unforeclosed by the present (Pinar 2019 , p. 12)

Texts regarding this pandemic’s consequences are appearing at an accelerating pace, with constant coverage by news outlets, as well as philosophical, historical, and sociological reflections by public intellectuals worldwide. Ripples from the current emergency have spread into the personal, social, and economic spheres. But are there continuities as well? Is the pandemic creating a “new normal” in education or simply accenting what has already become normal—an accelerating tendency toward technologization? This tendency presents an important challenge for education, requiring a critical vision of post-Covid-19 curriculum. One must pose an additional question: How can one resist the slide into passive technologization and seize the possibility of achieving a responsive, ethical, humane, and international-transformational approach to education?

The ongoing present

Unpredicted except through science fiction, movie scripts, and novels, the Covid-19 pandemic has changed everyday life, caused wide-scale illness and death, and provoked preventive measures like social distancing, confinement, and school closures. It has struck disproportionately at those who provide essential services and those unable to work remotely; in an already precarious marketplace, unemployment is having terrible consequences. The pandemic is now the chief sign of both globalization and deglobalization, as nations close borders and airports sit empty. There are no departures, no delays. Everything has changed, and no one was prepared. The pandemic has disrupted the flow of time and unraveled what was normal. It is the emergence of an event (think of Badiou 2009 ) that restarts time, creates radical ruptures and imbalances, and brings about a contingency that becomes a new necessity (Žižek 2020 ). Such events question the ongoing present.

The pandemic has reshuffled our needs, which are now based on a new order. Whether of short or medium duration, will it end in a return to the “normal” or move us into an unknown future? Žižek contends that “there is no return to normal, the new ‘normal’ will have to be constructed on the ruins of our old lives, or we will find ourselves in a new barbarism whose signs are already clearly discernible” (Žižek 2020 , p. 3).

Despite public health measures, Gil ( 2020 ) observes that the pandemic has so far generated no physical or spiritual upheaval and no universal awareness of the need to change how we live. Techno-capitalism continues to work, though perhaps not as before. Online sales increase and professionals work from home, thereby creating new digital subjectivities and economies. We will not escape the pull of self-preservation, self-regeneration, and the metamorphosis of capitalism, which will continue its permanent revolution (Wells 2020 ). In adapting subjectivities to the recent demands of digital capitalism, the pandemic can catapult us into an even more thoroughly digitalized space, a trend that artificial intelligence will accelerate. These new subjectivities will exhibit increased capacities for voluntary obedience and programmable functioning abilities, leading to a “new normal” benefiting those who are savvy in software-structured social relationships.

The Covid-19 pandemic has submerged us all in the tsunami-like economies of the Cloud. There is an intensification of the allegro rhythm of adaptation to the Internet of Things (Davies, Beauchamp, Davies, and Price 2019 ). For Latour ( 2020 ), the pandemic has become internalized as an ongoing state of emergency preparing us for the next crisis—climate change—for which we will see just how (un)prepared we are. Along with inequality, climate is one of the most pressing issues of our time (OECD 2019a , 2019b ) and therefore its representation in the curriculum is of public, not just private, interest.

Education both reflects what is now and anticipates what is next, recoding private and public responses to crises. Žižek ( 2020 , p. 117) suggests in this regard that “values and beliefs should not be simply ignored: they play an important role and should be treated as a specific mode of assemblage”. As such, education is (post)human and has its (over)determination by beliefs and values, themselves encoded in technology.

Will the pandemic detoxify our addiction to technology, or will it cement that addiction? Pinar ( 2019 , pp. 14–15) suggests that “this idea—that technological advance can overcome cultural, economic, educational crises—has faded into the background. It is our assumption. Our faith prompts the purchase of new technology and assures we can cure climate change”. While waiting for technology to rescue us, we might also remember to look at ourselves. In this way, the pandemic could be a starting point for a more sustainable environment. An intelligent response to climate change, reactivating the humanistic tradition in education, would reaffirm the right to such an education as a global common good (UNESCO 2015a , p. 10):

This approach emphasizes the inclusion of people who are often subject to discrimination – women and girls, indigenous people, persons with disabilities, migrants, the elderly and people living in countries affected by conflict. It requires an open and flexible approach to learning that is both lifelong and life-wide: an approach that provides the opportunity for all to realize their potential for a sustainable future and a life of dignity”.

Pinar ( 2004 , 2009 , 2019 ) concevies of curriculum as a complicated conversation. Central to that complicated conversation is climate change, which drives the need for education for sustainable development and the grooming of new global citizens with sustainable lifestyles and exemplary environmental custodianship (Marope 2017 ).

The new normal

The pandemic ushers in a “new” normal, in which digitization enforces ways of working and learning. It forces education further into technologization, a development already well underway, fueled by commercialism and the reigning market ideology. Daniel ( 2020 , p. 1) notes that “many institutions had plans to make greater use of technology in teaching, but the outbreak of Covid-19 has meant that changes intended to occur over months or years had to be implemented in a few days”.

Is this “new normal” really new or is it a reiteration of the old?

Digital technologies are the visible face of the immediate changes taking place in society—the commercial society—and schools. The immediate solution to the closure of schools is distance learning, with platforms proliferating and knowledge demoted to information to be exchanged (Koopman 2019 ), like a product, a phenomenon predicted decades ago by Lyotard ( 1984 , pp. 4-5):

Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valued in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its use-value.

Digital technologies and economic rationality based on performance are significant determinants of the commercialization of learning. Moving from physical face-to-face presence to virtual contact (synchronous and asynchronous), the learning space becomes disembodied, virtual not actual, impacting both student learning and the organization of schools, which are no longer buildings but websites. Such change is not only coterminous with the pandemic, as the Education 2030 Agenda (UNESCO 2015b ) testified; preceding that was the Delors Report (Delors 1996 ), which recoded education as lifelong learning that included learning to know, learning to do, learning to be, and learning to live together.

Transnational organizations have specified competences for the 21st century and, in the process, have defined disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge that encourages global citizenship, through “the supra curriculum at the global, regional, or international comparative level” (Marope 2017 , p. 10). According to UNESCO ( 2017 ):

While the world may be increasingly interconnected, human rights violations, inequality and poverty still threaten peace and sustainability. Global Citizenship Education (GCED) is UNESCO’s response to these challenges. It works by empowering learners of all ages to understand that these are global, not local issues and to become active promoters of more peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, secure and sustainable societies.

These transnational initiatives have not only acknowledged traditional school subjects but have also shifted the curriculum toward timely topics dedicated to understanding the emergencies of the day (Spiller 2017 ). However, for the OECD ( 2019a ), the “new normal” accentuates two ideas: competence-based education, which includes the knowledges identified in the Delors Report , and a new learning framework structured by digital technologies. The Covid-19 pandemic does not change this logic. Indeed, the interdisciplinary skills framework, content and standardized testing associated with the Programme for International Student Assessment of the OECD has become the most powerful tool for prescribing the curriculum. Educationally, “the universal homogenous ‘state’ exists already. Globalization of standardized testing—the most prominent instance of threatening to restructure schools into technological sites of political socialization, conditioning children for compliance to a universal homogeneous state of mind” (Pinar 2019 , p. 2).

In addition to cognitive and practical skills, this “homogenous state of mind” rests on so-called social and emotional skills in the service of learning to live together, affirming global citizenship, and presumably returning agency to students and teachers (OECD 2019a ). According to Marope ( 2017 , p. 22), “this calls for higher flexibility in curriculum development, and for the need to leave space for curricula interpretation, contextualization, and creativity at the micro level of teachers and classrooms”. Heterogeneity is thus enlisted in the service of both economic homogeneity and disciplinary knowledge. Disciplinary knowledge is presented as universal and endowed with social, moral, and cognitive authority. Operational and effective knowledge becomes central, due to the influence of financial lobbies, thereby ensuring that the logic of the market is brought into the practices of schools. As Pestre ( 2013 , p. 21) observed, “the nature of this knowledge is new: what matters is that it makes hic et nunc the action, its effect and not its understanding”. Its functionality follows (presumably) data and evidence-based management.

A new language is thus imposed on education and the curriculum. Such enforced installation of performative language and Big Data lead to effective and profitable operations in a vast market concerned with competence in operational skills (Lyotard 1984 ). This “new normal” curriculum is said to be more horizontal and less hierarchical and radically polycentric with problem-solving produced through social networks, NGOs, transnational organizations, and think tanks (Pestre 2013 ; Williamson 2013 , 2017 ). Untouched by the pandemic, the “new (old) normal” remains based on disciplinary knowledge and enmeshed in the discourse of standards and accountability in education.

Such enforced commercialism reflects and reinforces economic globalization. Pinar ( 2011 , p. 30) worries that “the globalization of instrumental rationality in education threatens the very existence of education itself”. In his theory, commercialism and the technical instrumentality by which homogenization advances erase education as an embodied experience and the curriculum as a humanistic project. It is a time in which the humanities are devalued as well, as acknowledged by Pinar ( 2019 , p. 19): “In the United States [and in the world] not only does economics replace education—STEM replace the liberal arts as central to the curriculum—there are even politicians who attack the liberal arts as subversive and irrelevant…it can be more precisely characterized as reckless rhetoric of a know-nothing populism”. Replacing in-person dialogical encounters and the educational cultivation of the person (via Bildung and currere ), digital technologies are creating uniformity of learning spaces, in spite of their individualistic tendencies. Of course, education occurs outside schools—and on occasion in schools—but this causal displacement of the centrality of the school implies a devaluation of academic knowledge in the name of diversification of learning spaces.

In society, education, and specifically in the curriculum, the pandemic has brought nothing new but rather has accelerated already existing trends that can be summarized as technologization. Those who can work “remotely” exercise their privilege, since they can exploit an increasingly digital society. They themselves are changed in the process, as their own subjectivities are digitalized, thus predisposing them to a “curriculum of things” (a term coined by Laist ( 2016 ) to describe an object-oriented pedagogical approach), which is organized not around knowledge but information (Koopman 2019 ; Couldry and Mejias 2019 ). This (old) “new normal” was advanced by the OECD, among other international organizations, thus precipitating what some see as “a dynamic and transformative articulation of collective expectations of the purpose, quality, and relevance of education and learning to holistic, inclusive, just, peaceful, and sustainable development, and to the well-being and fulfilment of current and future generations” (Marope 2017 , p. 13). Covid-19, illiberal democracy, economic nationalism, and inaction on climate change, all upend this promise.

Understanding the psychological and cultural complexity of the curriculum is crucial. Without appreciating the infinity of responses students have to what they study, one cannot engage in the complicated conversation that is the curriculum. There must be an affirmation of “not only the individualism of a person’s experience but [of what is] underlining the significance of a person’s response to a course of study that has been designed to ignore individuality in order to buttress nation, religion, ethnicity, family, and gender” (Grumet 2017 , p. 77). Rather than promoting neuroscience as the answer to the problems of curriculum and pedagogy, it is long-past time for rethinking curriculum development and addressing the canonical curriculum question: What knowledge is of most worth from a humanistic perspective that is structured by complicated conversation (UNESCO 2015a ; Pinar 2004 , 2019 )? It promotes respect for diversity and rejection of all forms of (cultural) hegemony, stereotypes, and biases (Pacheco 2009 , 2017 ).

Revisiting the curriculum in the Covid-19 era then expresses the fallacy of the “new normal” but also represents a particular opportunity to promote a different path forward.

Looking to the post-Covid-19 curriculum

Based on the notion of curriculum as a complicated conversation, as proposed by Pinar ( 2004 ), the post-Covid-19 curriculum can seize the possibility of achieving a responsive, ethical, humane education, one which requires a humanistic and internationally aware reconceptualization of curriculum.

While beliefs and values are anchored in social and individual practices (Pinar 2019 , p. 15), education extracts them for critique and reconsideration. For example, freedom and tolerance are not neutral but normative practices, however ideology-free policymakers imagine them to be.

That same sleight-of-hand—value neutrality in the service of a certain normativity—is evident in a digital concept of society as a relationship between humans and non-humans (or posthumans), a relationship not only mediated by but encapsulated within technology: machines interfacing with other machines. This is not merely a technological change, as if it were a quarantined domain severed from society. Technologization is a totalizing digitalization of human experience that includes the structures of society. It is less social than economic, with social bonds now recoded as financial transactions sutured by software. Now that subjectivity is digitalized, the human face has become an exclusively economic one that fabricates the fantasy of rational and free agents—always self-interested—operating in supposedly free markets. Oddly enough, there is no place for a vision of humanistic and internationally aware change. The technological dimension of curriculum is assumed to be the primary area of change, which has been deeply and totally imposed by global standards. The worldwide pandemic supports arguments for imposing forms of control (Žižek 2020 ), including the geolocation of infected people and the suspension—in a state of exception—of civil liberties.

By destroying democracy, the technology of control leads to totalitarianism and barbarism, ending tolerance, difference, and diversity. Remembrance and memory are needed so that historical fascisms (Eley 2020 ) are not repeated, albeit in new disguises (Adorno 2011 ). Technologized education enhances efficiency and ensures uniformity, while presuming objectivity to the detriment of human reflection and singularity. It imposes the running data of the Curriculum of Things and eschews intellectual endeavor, critical attitude, and self-reflexivity.

For those who advocate the primacy of technology and the so-called “free market”, the pandemic represents opportunities not only for profit but also for confirmation of the pervasiveness of human error and proof of the efficiency of the non-human, i.e., the inhuman technology. What may possibly protect children from this inhumanity and their commodification, as human capital, is a humane or humanistic education that contradicts their commodification.

The decontextualized technical vocabulary in use in a market society produces an undifferentiated image in which people are blinded to nuance, distinction, and subtlety. For Pestre, concepts associated with efficiency convey the primacy of economic activity to the exclusion, for instance, of ethics, since those concepts devalue historic (if unrealized) commitments to equality and fraternity by instead emphasizing economic freedom and the autonomy of self-interested individuals. Constructing education as solely economic and technological constitutes a movement toward total efficiency through the installation of uniformity of behavior, devaluing diversity and human creativity.

Erased from the screen is any image of public education as a space of freedom, or as Macdonald ( 1995 , p. 38) holds, any image or concept of “the dignity and integrity of each human”. Instead, what we face is the post-human and the undisputed reign of instrumental reality, where the ends justify the means and human realization is reduced to the consumption of goods and experiences. As Pinar ( 2019 , p. 7) observes: “In the private sphere…. freedom is recast as a choice of consumer goods; in the public sphere, it converts to control and the demand that freedom flourish, so that whatever is profitable can be pursued”. Such “negative” freedom—freedom from constraint—ignores “positive” freedom, which requires us to contemplate—in ethical and spiritual terms—what that freedom is for. To contemplate what freedom is for requires “critical and comprehensive knowledge” (Pestre 2013 , p. 39) not only instrumental and technical knowledge. The humanities and the arts would reoccupy the center of such a curriculum and not be related to its margins (Westbury 2008 ), acknowledging that what is studied within schools is a complicated conversation among those present—including oneself, one’s ancestors, and those yet to be born (Pinar 2004 ).

In an era of unconstrained technologization, the challenge facing the curriculum is coding and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), with technology dislodging those subjects related to the human. This is not a classical curriculum (although it could be) but one focused on the emergencies of the moment–namely, climate change, the pandemic, mass migration, right-wing populism, and economic inequality. These timely topics, which in secondary school could be taught as short courses and at the elementary level as thematic units, would be informed by the traditional school subjects (yes, including STEM). Such a reorganization of the curriculum would allow students to see how academic knowledge enables them to understand what is happening to them and their parents in their own regions and globally. Such a cosmopolitan curriculum would prepare children to become citizens not only of their own nations but of the world. This citizenship would simultaneously be subjective and social, singular and universal (Marope 2020 ). Pinar ( 2019 , p. 5) reminds us that “the division between private and public was first blurred then erased by technology”:

No longer public, let alone sacred, morality becomes a matter of privately held values, sometimes monetized as commodities, statements of personal preference, often ornamental, sometimes self-servingly instrumental. Whatever their function, values were to be confined to the private sphere. The public sphere was no longer the civic square but rather, the marketplace, the site where one purchased whatever one valued.

New technological spaces are the universal center for (in)human values. The civic square is now Amazon, Alibaba, Twitter, WeChat, and other global online corporations. The facts of our human condition—a century-old phrase uncanny in its echoes today—can be studied in schools as an interdisciplinary complicated conversation about public issues that eclipse private ones (Pinar 2019 ), including social injustice, inequality, democracy, climate change, refugees, immigrants, and minority groups. Understood as a responsive, ethical, humane and transformational international educational approach, such a post-Covid-19 curriculum could be a “force for social equity, justice, cohesion, stability, and peace” (Marope 2017 , p. 32). “Unchosen” is certainly the adjective describing our obligations now, as we are surrounded by death and dying and threatened by privation or even starvation, as economies collapse and food-supply chains are broken. The pandemic may not mean deglobalization, but it surely accentuates it, as national borders are closed, international travel is suspended, and international trade is impacted by the accompanying economic crisis. On the other hand, economic globalization could return even stronger, as could the globalization of education systems. The “new normal” in education is the technological order—a passive technologization—and its expansion continues uncontested and even accelerated by the pandemic.

Two Greek concepts, kronos and kairos , allow a discussion of contrasts between the quantitative and the qualitative in education. Echoing the ancient notion of kronos are the technologically structured curriculum values of quantity and performance, which are always assessed by a standardized accountability system enforcing an “ideology of achievement”. “While kronos refers to chronological or sequential time, kairos refers to time that might require waiting patiently for a long time or immediate and rapid action; which course of action one chooses will depend on the particular situation” (Lahtinen 2009 , p. 252).

For Macdonald ( 1995 , p. 51), “the central ideology of the schools is the ideology of achievement …[It] is a quantitative ideology, for even to attempt to assess quality must be quantified under this ideology, and the educational process is perceived as a technically monitored quality control process”.

Self-evaluation subjectively internalizes what is useful and in conformity with the techno-economy and its so-called standards, increasingly enforcing technical (software) forms. If recoded as the Internet of Things, this remains a curriculum in allegiance with “order and control” (Doll 2013 , p. 314) School knowledge is reduced to an instrument for economic success, employing compulsory collaboration to ensure group think and conformity. Intertwined with the Internet of Things, technological subjectivity becomes embedded in software, redesigned for effectiveness, i.e., or use-value (as Lyotard predicted).

The Curriculum of Things dominates the Internet, which is simultaneously an object and a thing (see Heidegger 1967 , 1971 , 1977 ), a powerful “technological tool for the process of knowledge building” (Means 2008 , p. 137). Online learning occupies the subjective zone between the “curriculum-as-planned” and the “curriculum-as-lived” (Pinar 2019 , p. 23). The world of the curriculum-as-lived fades, as the screen shifts and children are enmeshed in an ocularcentric system of accountability and instrumentality.

In contrast to kronos , the Greek concept of kairos implies lived time or even slow time (Koepnick 2014 ), time that is “self-reflective” (Macdonald 1995 , p. 103) and autobiographical (Pinar 2009 , 2004), thus inspiring “curriculum improvisation” (Aoki 2011 , p. 375), while emphasizing “the plurality of subjectivities” (Grumet 2017 , p. 80). Kairos emphasizes singularity and acknowledges particularities; it is skeptical of similarities. For Shew ( 2013 , p. 48), “ kairos is that which opens an originary experience—of the divine, perhaps, but also of life or being. Thought as such, kairos as a formative happening—an opportune moment, crisis, circumstance, event—imposes its own sense of measure on time”. So conceived, curriculum can become a complicated conversation that occurs not in chronological time but in its own time. Such dialogue is not neutral, apolitical, or timeless. It focuses on the present and is intrinsically subjective, even in public space, as Pinar ( 2019 , p. 12) writes: “its site is subjectivity as one attunes oneself to what one is experiencing, yes to its immediacy and specificity but also to its situatedness, relatedness, including to what lies beyond it and not only spatially but temporally”.

Kairos is, then, the uniqueness of time that converts curriculum into a complicated conversation, one that includes the subjective reconstruction of learning as a consciousness of everyday life, encouraging the inner activism of quietude and disquietude. Writing about eternity, as an orientation towards the future, Pinar ( 2019 , p. 2) argues that “the second side [the first is contemplation] of such consciousness is immersion in daily life, the activism of quietude – for example, ethical engagement with others”. We add disquietude now, following the work of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Disquietude is a moment of eternity: “Sometimes I think I’ll never leave ‘Douradores’ Street. And having written this, it seems to me eternity. Neither pleasure, nor glory, nor power. Freedom, only freedom” (Pesssoa 1991 ).

The disquietude conversation is simultaneously individual and public. It establishes an international space both deglobalized and autonomous, a source of responsive, ethical, and humane encounter. No longer entranced by the distracting dynamic stasis of image-after-image on the screen, the student can face what is his or her emplacement in the physical and natural world, as well as the technological world. The student can become present as a person, here and now, simultaneously historical and timeless.

Conclusions

Slow down and linger should be our motto now. A slogan yes, but it also represents a political, as well as a psychological resistance to the acceleration of time (Berg and Seeber 2016 )—an acceleration that the pandemic has intensified. Covid-19 has moved curriculum online, forcing children physically apart from each other and from their teachers and especially from the in-person dialogical encounters that classrooms can provide. The public space disappears into the pre-designed screen space that software allows, and the machine now becomes the material basis for a curriculum of things, not persons. Like the virus, the pandemic curriculum becomes embedded in devices that technologize our children.

Although one hundred years old, the images created in Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin return, less humorous this time than emblematic of our intensifying subjection to technological necessity. It “would seem to leave us as cogs in the machine, ourselves like moving parts, we keep functioning efficiently, increasing productivity calculating the creative destruction of what is, the human now materialized (de)vices ensnaring us in convenience, connectivity, calculation” (Pinar 2019 , p. 9). Post-human, as many would say.

Technology supports standardized testing and enforces software-designed conformity and never-ending self-evaluation, while all the time erasing lived, embodied experience and intellectual independence. Ignoring the evidence, others are sure that technology can function differently: “Given the potential of information and communication technologies, the teacher should now be a guide who enables learners, from early childhood throughout their learning trajectories, to develop and advance through the constantly expanding maze of knowledge” (UNESCO 2015a , p. 51). Would that it were so.

The canonical question—What knowledge is of most worth?—is open-ended and contentious. In a technologized world, providing for the well-being of children is not obvious, as well-being is embedded in ancient, non-neoliberal visions of the world. “Education is everybody’s business”, Pinar ( 2019 , p. 2) points out, as it fosters “responsible citizenship and solidarity in a global world” (UNESCO 2015a , p. 66), resisting inequality and the exclusion, for example, of migrant groups, refugees, and even those who live below or on the edge of poverty.

In this fast-moving digital world, education needs to be inclusive but not conformist. As the United Nations ( 2015 ) declares, education should ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. “The coming years will be a vital period to save the planet and to achieve sustainable, inclusive human development” (United Nations 2019 , p. 64). Is such sustainable, inclusive human development achievable through technologization? Can technology succeed where religion has failed?

Despite its contradictions and economic emphases, public education has one clear obligation—to create embodied encounters of learning through curriculum conceived as a complicated conversation. Such a conception acknowledges the worldliness of a cosmopolitan curriculum as it affirms the personification of the individual (Pinar 2011 ). As noted by Grumet ( 2017 , p. 89), “as a form of ethics, there is a responsibility to participate in conversation”. Certainly, it is necessary to ask over and over again the canonical curriculum question: What knowledge is of most worth?

If time, technology and teaching are moving images of eternity, curriculum and pedagogy are also, both ‘moving’ and ‘images’ but not an explicit, empirical, or exact representation of eternity…if reality is an endless series of ‘moving images’, the canonical curriculum question—What knowledge is of most worth?—cannot be settled for all time by declaring one set of subjects eternally important” (Pinar 2019 , p. 12).

In a complicated conversation, the curriculum is not a fixed image sliding into a passive technologization. As a “moving image”, the curriculum constitutes a politics of presence, an ongoing expression of subjectivity (Grumet 2017 ) that affirms the infinity of reality: “Shifting one’s attitude from ‘reducing’ complexity to ‘embracing’ what is always already present in relations and interactions may lead to thinking complexly, abiding happily with mystery” (Doll 2012 , p. 172). Describing the dialogical encounter characterizing conceived curriculum, as a complicated conversation, Pinar explains that this moment of dialogue “is not only place-sensitive (perhaps classroom centered) but also within oneself”, because “the educational significance of subject matter is that it enables the student to learn from actual embodied experience, an outcome that cannot always be engineered” (Pinar 2019 , pp. 12–13). Lived experience is not technological. So, “the curriculum of the future is not just a matter of defining content and official knowledge. It is about creating, sculpting, and finessing minds, mentalities, and identities, promoting style of thought about humans, or ‘mashing up’ and ‘making up’ the future of people” (Williamson 2013 , p. 113).

Yes, we need to linger and take time to contemplate the curriculum question. Only in this way will we share what is common and distinctive in our experience of the current pandemic by changing our time and our learning to foreclose on our future. Curriculum conceived as a complicated conversation restarts historical not screen time; it enacts the private and public as distinguishable, not fused in a computer screen. That is the “new normal”.

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My thanks to William F. Pinar. Friendship is another moving image of eternity. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer. This work is financed by national funds through the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, under the project PTDC / CED-EDG / 30410/2017, Centre for Research in Education, Institute of Education, University of Minho.

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Pacheco, J.A. The “new normal” in education. Prospects 51 , 3–14 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-020-09521-x

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Essay from The New Normal in Asia Series

The “new normal”: thoughts about the shape of things to come in the post-pandemic world.

Nicholas Eberstadt offers insights into the challenges to U.S. leadership in a post-pandemic world. This is the inaugural essay in the series “ The New Normal in Asia ,” which explores ways in which the Covid-19 pandemic might adjust, shape, or reorder the world across multiple dimensions.

Though we are as yet barely weeks into the Covid-19 pandemic, what should already be apparent is that it has precipitated the deepest and most fundamental crisis for Pax Americana that this set of global economic and security arrangements has faced in the past three postwar generations.

We are still very much in the “fog of war” phase of the calamity. The novel coronavirus and its worldwide carnage have come as a strategic surprise to thought leaders and political decision-makers alike. Indeed, it appears to be the intellectual equivalent of an unexpected asteroid strike for almost all who must cope in these unfamiliar new surroundings. Few had seriously considered the contingency that the world economy might be shaken to its foundations by a communicable disease. And even now that this has happened, many remain trapped in the mental coordinates of a world that no longer exists.

Such “prewar” thinking is evident everywhere right now in the earliest phase of what may turn out to be a grave and protracted crisis. Here in the United States, we watch, week by week, as highly regarded financial analysts from Wall Street and economists from the academy misestimate the depths of the damage we can expect—always erring on the side of optimism.

After the March lockdown of the country to “flatten the curve,” the boldest voices dared to venture that the United States might hit 10% unemployment before the worst was over. Four weekly jobless claims reports and 22 million unemployment insurance applications later, U.S. unemployment is already above the 15% mark: north of 1931 levels, in other words. By the end of April, we could well reach or break the 20% threshold, bringing us to 1935 levels, and 1933 levels (25%) no longer sound fantastical. Even so, political and financial leaders talk of a rapid “V-shaped recovery” commencing in the summer, bringing us back to economic normalcy within months. This is prewar thinking, and it is looking increasingly like the economic equivalent of talk in earlier times about how “the boys will be home by Christmas.”

This is moreover a global crisis, and vision has not yet focused on the new realities in other leading powers and major economies. If we try to take an unflinching measure of the impact globally, we can see both good news and bad news—although the two are by no means equally balanced.

The good news is that policymakers the world over have learned from the prewar Great Depression and are unlikely to repeat its exact mistakes. Instead of reducing the money supply and forcing bank collapses, the U.S. Federal Reserve this time is flooding the world with liquidity. Likewise, U.S. fiscal policy, far from attempting to impose further austerity on an already imploding economy through balancing budgets, is embracing Keynesianism with an abandon that might have startled Keynes himself. Given the “stimulus” packages already passed in the last month, this year’s U.S. budget deficit to GDP ratio is already certain to be of World War II scale. And, at least so far, no emanations of Smoot-Hawley-like impulses are on the policy horizon. Last time around, protectionism had devastating reverberations on an already severely stressed international trade and financial system. Confidence in U.S. and international economic management of the current crisis, at least for the time being, is reflected  inter alia  in the surprisingly sanguine valuations of the stock indices both in the United States and abroad.

The bad news, on the other hand, lies in the nature of the virus itself and in its implications for human life and socioeconomic arrangements. Covid-19 is an extremely contagious virus with high lethality for those exposed to it, and it can be transmitted by asymptomatic “super spreaders.” Further, since this disease is zoonotic (contracted from another species) and novel (our species has no preexisting immunity), the pandemic will roam the world in search of human quarry until an effective vaccine is invented and mass-produced—or until so many people are infected that herd immunity is conferred.

A Darwinian experiment to invite global herd immunity is unthinkable because it could entail untold millions of deaths. New vaccines, for their part, typically take many years to develop. Barring some miracle, even a crash program to perfect a vaccine is currently expected to take at least a year, and it could be a year and a half or longer before a serviceable serum is generally available to the public. Reports now emanating from South Korea, moreover, suggest that survivors might also be susceptible to reinfection. If so, the quest to come up with a lasting inoculation against Covid-19 may be all that much more daunting.

Consequently, societies the world over face the prospect of rolling lockdowns and quarantines until such time as a technological breakthrough rescues them from this condition. This would seem to mean that not just a single national lockdown of a country’s population and economy is in store to fend off mass contagion but rather quite possibly a succession of them—not just one mother-of-all-economic-shocks but an ongoing crisis that presses economic performance severely in countries all around the world simultaneously.

The potential downside of this crisis looks dire enough for affluent societies: even with excellent economic management, they may be in for gruesome recessions, both painful and prolonged. But the situation for the populations of low-income countries—and for least-developed, fragile states—could prove positively catastrophic. Not only are governments in these locales much less capable of responding to pandemics, but malnourished and health-compromised people are much more likely to succumb to them. Even apart from the humanitarian disasters that may result directly from raging outbreaks in poor countries, terrible indirect consequences may also lie in wait for these vulnerable societies. The collapse of economic activity, including demand for commodities, such as minerals and energy, will mean that export earnings and international remittances to poor countries are set to crash in the months ahead and remain low for an indefinite period. Entirely apart from contagion and lockdowns, this can only mean an unavoidable explosion of desperate need—and under governments least equipped to deal with this. While we can hope for the best, the worst could be much, much worse than most observers currently imagine.

Eventually, of course, we will emerge from the current crisis. Envisioning the post-crisis “new normal” is extraordinarily difficult at this early juncture—not that much less demanding, perhaps, than imagining what the postwar world would look like from the vantage point of, say, autumn 1939. Lacking clairvoyance, we can only peer through the glass darkly at what may be the shape of things to come in the post-pandemic order. Yet it is not too soon to offer one safe prediction about that coming order, and to identify three critical but as yet unanswerable questions, the answers to which promise to shape it decisively.

The safe prediction is that the Indo-Pacific, then as now, will be the locus of global economic, political, and military power—and will remain so for at least the coming generation, possibly much longer. Currently, countries belonging to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) account for as much as 60% of the world’s estimated GDP and close to half of global trade. If we add India, which is not an APEC member, to that roster, the economic predominance of the region looks even more overwhelming. APEC plus India likewise accounts for much—perhaps most—of the ongoing knowledge production in the world today. By such necessarily imprecise measures as publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, authors from the APEC-plus-India region are responsible for about three-fifths of current global output. The only state with truly global military capabilities (the United States) is part of this region, as are the only other two governments entertaining global strategic ambitions (China and Russia). In addition to these countries, India and (alas) North Korea are nuclear weapons states. For the moment, the combined nuclear potential of all nuclear powers outside the APEC-plus-India region (France, Britain, Pakistan, and Israel) is dwarfed by the atomic arsenals within it.

Barring a catastrophe of truly biblical proportion (a formulation that may admittedly seem to be tempting fate, given current circumstances) it is impossible to see what configuration of states or regions could displace the Indo-Pacific as the epicenter of world power anytime soon. Someday Africa might in theory become a contender for geopolitical dominance, but that date looks so distant that such scenarios for now are perhaps best narrated by science fiction writers.

“Will the Covid-19 pandemic bring a brutal end to the second age of globalization that began in 1945, just as World War I heralded the cataclysmic death of the first globalization (1870–1914)?”

As for the questions that stand decisively to shape the coming global order, the first concerns the scope and character of what we have been calling “globalization” in the years and decades ahead. Will the Covid-19 pandemic bring a brutal end to the second age of globalization that began in 1945, just as World War I heralded the cataclysmic death of the first globalization (1870–1914)?

At this early point in the crisis, it would take a brave (or foolish) soul to assert confidently that an end to our current far-reaching arrangements for world economic integration simply could not happen. That said, at least for now, it would look as if a lot of things that have not yet gone wrong would have to go wrong, and at the same time sweep away the foundations (and memory plastic) for the networks of trade, finance, communications, technology, culture, and more that have come to deeply connect societies all around the world today. Not much less than a continuing, cascading, and unabated series of worldwide political blunders—not excluding military adventures—would be required to burn this edifice to the ground.

On the other hand, it is also hard to see how a post-pandemic world will pick itself up and carry on with commerce, finance, and global governance as if nothing much happened around the year 2020. Even under the optimistic assumptions—i.e., the assumptions wherein the second age of globalization survives Covid-19’s heavy blow—much will need to be dramatically different. Until the advent of some biometric, post-privacy future, the more or less free movement of peoples across national borders will be a nonstarter. “Davos” stands to become a quaint word, somewhat like “Esperanto,” as national interests and economic nationalism come roaring back. International supply chains will tend to be resourced domestically, notwithstanding the immediate apparent cost in terms of production and profits. At the same time, today’s crisis may explode and wipe out old inefficient business models that had already outlived their usefulness: the “big box” store and retail malls, the unproductive (but sociologically alluring) office, the law firm (with its Soviet-style valuations of its services on the basis of inputs rather than outputs), perhaps the cartelized, price-fixing university as well, and more.

On the positive side, the creative destruction the crisis will unleash will eventually offer immense opportunities for innovation and dynamic improvements in productivity, so long as resources from inefficient or bankrupt undertakings are reallocated to more promising new purposes. To give just one example, the returns on remote communications will likely be high, incentivizing impressive breakthroughs. Post-pandemic economies around the world will need all the productivity surges they can squeeze out of technological and organizational innovation, too—for they will almost certainly be saddled with a far higher burden of public debt than today. Moreover, given current demographic trends and the prospect of significantly less immigration, the shrinking of labor forces and the pronounced aging of national populations may be characteristic of a growing number of economies in the APEC-plus-India region and the rest of the world, and not just in high-income settings. Japan may become a model here, but not in a good way: avoiding “Japanification” could become a preoccupation of policymakers, pundits, and populaces in an epoch of diminished expectations for globalization.

A second huge question for the post-pandemic world concerns China: more specifically, how will the rest of the international community treat this increasingly powerful but intrinsically problematic state?

The world has yet to conduct the authoritative blue-ribbon scientific inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic that is obviously and urgently needed. However, there is little doubt that heavy responsibility for the global health and economic crisis we are now coping with falls on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—and to a lesser but by no means negligible degree, on China’s collaborators within the World Health Organization. Had the CCP placed its population’s health above its own—had it behaved like an open society or followed international transparency norms—there is no question that the global toll from the Covid-19 pandemic would only be a fraction of what has been exacted to date. Epidemiologists from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom have suggested that the damage might have been contained to just 5% of what we have thus far suffered with an expeditious (and honest) response to the Wuhan outbreak. If that estimate is overly precise, it nonetheless gives a sense of the price the world has paid for the CCP’s priorities and standard operating procedure. We also already know of the complicity of the World Health Organization at its highest levels in buying time for Beijing as the regime figured out how to spin the story of what happened in Hubei Province.

“…the post-pandemic world will have no choice but to contend at last with a problem long in the making: the awful dilemma of global integration without solidarity.”

It would be one thing if this crisis were a one-off—dreadful as the tragedy would be. The problem, unfortunately, is that it is not a one-off, and in fact cannot be. At the heart of the tragedy is an uncomfortable but unavoidable truth: the CCP simply does not share the same interests and norms as the international community into which it has been so momentously and thoroughly integrated. Moreover, there is scant evidence that integration into the world economy and global governance has been “reforming” the Chinese regime, in the sense of bringing its politics and behavior into closer alignment with those acceptable to Western populations. Quite the contrary: in the Xi Jinping era, China’s politics have manifestly been moving away from convergence as the regime has concentrated on perfecting a surveillance state policed by “market totalitarianism” (a social credit system powered by big data, artificial intelligence, and more).

Thus, the post-pandemic world will have no choice but to contend at last with a problem long in the making: the awful dilemma of global integration without solidarity. China is deeply interlinked with every APEC-plus-India economy and with those of the rest of the world as well. Chinese interests are likewise deeply embedded in much of the institutional apparatus that has evolved to facilitate international cooperation. How will the rest of the countries in the international community manage to protect their interests (including health security interests, but by no means limited to this alone) in such a world? Will it be possible to accurately identify and carefully isolate all the areas in which win-win transactions with the CCP are genuinely possible and cordon off everything else? Or will the CCP’s authoritarian influence compromise, corrupt, and degrade these same institutions, and likewise constrain or poison opportunities for truly free international economic cooperation and development after the Covid-19 pandemic?

Last, but by no means least important, there is the question of the United States’ disposition in a post-pandemic world.

Even before the Covid-19 crisis, it was not exactly a secret that the United States—which is to say, Americans—was becoming increasingly reluctant to shoulder responsibility for world leadership in the global order that Washington had been instrumental in creating and that U.S. power was indispensable in supporting. The skepticism and disfavor with which American proponents of internationalism were increasingly greeted at home, however, was not entirely explained by the deep historical roots of isolationism in our country. Nor can it be dismissively described as yet another paroxysm of paranoia and anti-intellectualism on the part of the yahoos, as would-be Hofstadters from today’s chattering classes would like to have it.

Such discontent with our nation’s considerable international obligations skews strongly with socioeconomic status. For those in the bottom half of the country, grievances with the status quo (which not so incidentally includes a strong political commitment to Pax Americana) are by no means delusional. Over the past two generations, the American escalator has broken down for many. Just before the Covid-19 crisis, at the supposed peak of a business cycle, work rates for prime-age American men (the 25–54 age group) were slightly lower than they had been in 1939, near the end of the Great Depression. It is hardly reassuring that this alarming situation has attracted relatively little attention from the talking and deciding classes (many of whom are shielded from personal familiarity with how the other half lives by Charles Murray’s famous bubble).

Scarcely less disconcerting than the work rates for American men are the dismal trends in wealth formation for the less well to do. According to estimates by the Federal Reserve, the mean real net worth for the bottom half of households in the United States was lower in 2019 than it had been in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. By these estimates, in fact, the net worth of such households was at least a sixth lower in 2019 than it had been three decades before. Voters from these households might be excused if they were prompted to ask what the fabled “end of the Cold War” had done for them. Recall that these same Americans witnessed a decline in net household worth in a period when overall nominal net worth in the United States soared by almost $80 trillion—an average of almost $250,000 for every man, woman, and child in our country today. Since the arrival of Covid-19 on our shores, the net worth of the bottom half of Americans has dropped still further, as their indebtedness has risen and the value of their assets (mainly homes) declined. It could be quite some time before the balance sheets of those homes look as “favorable” as they did in 2019.

In the United States, the constitutional duty to obtain the consent of the governed obtains for the little people, too, even if they happen to comprise a majority of voters. And in a post-pandemic world, it may be even more difficult to convince a working majority that the globalized economy and other international entanglements actually work in their favor.

If U.S. leaders wanted to generate broad-based domestic support for Pax Americana, they need to devise a formula for generating prosperity for all. Such an agenda, of course, would win on its own merits, with or without an eye toward international security. Absent such a credible agenda, popular support for U.S. international leadership could prove increasingly open to question in the post-pandemic United States. The peril that declining domestic U.S. support poses to the current global order should not be minimized. If or when Pax Americana is destroyed, its demise may be due not to threats from without but rather to pressures from within.

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and is a Senior Advisor to the National Bureau of Asian Research.

Correction (June 18, 2020): An earlier version of this essay stated that the real net worth for the bottom half of households was a third, rather than a sixth, lower in 2019.

Nicholas Eberstadt

American Enterprise Institute,

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• Chinese Communist Party (CCP)

Student Reflections During the Pandemic: An Opportunity for Educators to Create a “New” Normal

As this challenging academic term begins, and some students are learning remotely, while others are heading back in person, we urge educators to pause and reflect on what worked — and didn’t — during remote learning last spring. While we eagerly await the moment when all schools can safely resume in person, we strongly caution against reverting back to the “normal” way of doing things. “Normal” was not working for so many students prior to COVID-19.

Since this remote learning experiment of 2020 upended typical school schedules and traditional approaches to teaching and learning, educators now have an opportunity to leverage key lessons and insights gained during this time to build a new normal that better supports student well-being, equity, and engagement with learning for all students during the next semester and beyond.

At Challenge Success , a school reform nonprofit affiliated with Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, we know that any school change process should begin by listening to the stakeholders who matter most — the students. So we reached out to some of the high school students who have participated in the Challenge Success School Program and asked what worked (or not) during remote learning and what they would like school leaders to know about their experiences last spring.

Their reflections, summarized below, are consistent with our SPACE framework and with the student-centered approaches and practices that research shows most effectively support student well-being and engagement with learning. We offer these as guiding principles for educators to use as they consider what schools might look like this fall, regardless of where school is happening.

1. Prioritize human connections and relationships.

During remote learning, daily check-ins from teachers via video, phone, or even hand-delivered letters were a lifeboat for many students. We heard from several teens that they were grateful for teachers who opened up Zoom rooms before or after class to hang out with students and ask about how they were handling life during the pandemic. The students also loved getting to peek into the lives of their teachers and coaches in their home environments with their own pets or children jumping into the video screen.

For students who were not able to join remote classes due to a lack of internet access or devices, or because they had to take on additional jobs and home responsibilities during this time, teachers found other creative ways to connect. Many reached out via text and arranged phone calls and even some home visits with proper social distancing to chat one-on-one. Matt, a 10th grader from Texas, reflected, “Our teachers did a great job of checking in with us to see how we were doing. I like how they really cared about our well-being and our stress levels, but I don’t think a crisis should be necessary to do this.”

Cultivating a climate of care that prioritizes strong relationships between students and teachers as well as peer-to-peer connections is critical now and in the future. Research shows that students who feel a sense of belonging and connection to both adults and peers in the school community are more engaged with learning. Students yearn to be seen, heard, and valued as whole people with lives beyond the classroom. We know that when students believe they have at least one adult at the school who cares about them and knows them well, they are more likely to thrive in school and out.

Unfortunately, creating and sustaining strong student-teacher relationships can be difficult. Even before remote learning began last spring, the large class sizes, hectic pace of the school day, and impossibly busy student and teacher schedules often impeded the type of personal connections we know are critical to student success. Schools should strive to make relationships a top priority and build in time and resources to ensure that teachers and students can connect in meaningful ways on a regular basis.

2. Redesign the school schedule to allow more hours for sleep, playtime, downtime, and family time (PDF).

The scramble to create a remote learning schedule provided an unexpected opportunity to rethink the structure of the school day. Many schools, out of necessity, offered fewer synchronous class meetings and more time for independent, asynchronous learning. Others that were able to offer more synchronous learning to students, decided to shift from a traditional 7 or 8 period day to a modified block schedule where students took half of their classes twice a week over four days leaving one day for dedicated office hours with teachers or online tutoring time.

One of the biggest and most consistent silver linings we heard from students was that the new schedules allowed teens to get more sleep. We know from the Challenge Success survey of over 200,000 students that high school students average about 6.5 hours of sleep per night – significantly less than the 8-10 hours they need to thrive. As Nate, 11th grader from Massachusetts, shared, “Since getting more sleep, I found I was much more efficient with my school work. I could do an English essay in two hours that would have taken me six hours when I was tired.”

Though many students missed their extracurricular activities in the spring, some found that the reduction in structured activities, along with the shorter school day, and lack of commute, resulted not just in more sleep, but in more playtime, downtime, and family time (or PDF as we call it). Research shows that time spent on PDF serves as a protective factor in keeping kids mentally and physically healthy.

Several teens told us that they finally had time to read for pleasure, play guitar, exercise, paint, or simply “do nothing” while they were sheltering in place. Being able to break up the day with exercise or other activities between classes helped to clear their minds and prepare for more learning. And for some students, this shift of pace was eye-opening. As Zack, an 11th grader from Massachusetts, reflected, “One of my big takeaways from this time is that I need time to relax. Before this, I was always going and going. I’m so used to being ‘on’ all the time, doing something. After this, I’ve realized I need some time to relax. I picked up fishing and now I love going fishing. I think that a lot of students will find that they actually need time to relax.”

When a typical student’s day pre-pandemic might have started before 7am and ended after 11pm due to school, sports, other extracurriculars, paid work, commuting, family obligations, and homework, many teens quite literally had no time for any of these essential “PDF” activities. Schools and families ought to question if the old “normal” is what we all want our students to return to this year. Though students and their parents ultimately decide how they spend their time outside of school — and many students do not have the option to scale back time spent doing paid work or supporting family obligations — schools can play a critical role in creating a schedule that honors the need for sleep and more free time for students. Later start times, longer passing periods and lunch breaks, more time for tutorial or advisory, and block classes where teachers and students can engage in deeper learning, are all elements that Challenge Success recommends that schools consider as they plan the schedule for the new school year.

3. Build in more flexibility to curriculum and assignments.

Annalise, a 10th grader from Massachusetts, reflected that “One great thing about distance learning was the flexibility.” Having more autonomy over when she got her work done and when she turned it in led to less stress. Soren, an 11 th grader from California, agreed: “With distance learning, whatever you need to do for yourself, you have that freedom to do – go for a run or take a break outside. The slower pace of life allowed me to learn on my own terms which definitely had benefits in terms of mental health and general well-being.”

Many students told us how much they appreciated the increased flexibility during remote learning to get assignments done on their own schedule. They liked that more teachers posted assignments a week or two in advance, which allowed students some control over their schedules and helped them to balance homework, jobs, and other responsibilities. In a pre-COVID world, some students didn’t find out their homework for the night until class that day. During remote learning, the students appreciated being recognized as whole people with varying home lives and multiple commitments and needs.

Flexible approaches to whole class instruction can also benefit students. We heard from one student that during a class held on Zoom, the teacher shared a lesson and then dismissed students as soon as they could demonstrate that they understood the concept. The teacher was able to work with a smaller group of students and use alternative approaches to teach those who were still working towards mastery. We know that differentiating instruction in this way was happening in many classrooms prior to remote learning, but as schools consider new ways of structuring classes in the future, they may want to build in even more time for small group work and review opportunities.

Schools can further support students by explicitly teaching time management and executive functioning skills. Flexible or self-determined due dates allow students a real-world opportunity to practice these skills. Educators can encourage students to self-advocate and reach out to their teachers when they are juggling multiple deliverables or when their health or well-being (or that of a family member) might necessitate even more flexibility. Creating conflict calendars where faculty members coordinate dates for major tests, projects, and school-wide events can also help to reduce student overload and increase student engagement and achievement on assignments.

4. Consider that “less is really more” and focus on transferable skills.

As the minutes spent per week in each class were reduced for many schools during remote learning, teachers were forced to strip their lesson plans down to the essential elements students should learn. While reducing content can feel uncomfortable to teachers and can cause worry about how to get through the required material, it can also provide an unexpected opportunity to focus on the enduring understandings we want students to master. Students are more likely to learn and retain skills and concepts when they are not overwhelmed by the load and pace of work being assigned.

Gabe, a 10th grader from Texas, reflected, “In chemistry, we didn’t cover as many topics each week during remote learning as we did during the normal school year, but I feel like I got a fuller understanding of the concepts that were being taught. My teacher used a ‘flipped classroom’ approach where we independently watched 20-minute videos he created on a specific topic and answered homework questions. We then used class time to ask the teacher questions. The whole process felt much more efficient.”

Shifting the focus from coverage to competency can provide both teachers and students space in the day to engage more deeply in the learning process and build more meaningful connections between concepts. When teachers prioritize transferable skills, students practice applying what they have learned to novel situations and ultimately build mastery.

Educators have an exciting opportunity now to redesign lessons and pare learning goals down to those that are essential in each subject area. Even when students face comprehensive end-of-year exams, for example, in advanced placement courses, a deeper focus on key concepts and critical thinking skills, such as use of evidence to back a claim, logical reasoning, and clear communication, may prove more beneficial to students than covering in a more cursory way all of the possible content that might show up on the test.

Before COVID-19, we regularly surveyed students about what, if anything, caused them the most stress. The number one answer was usually “workload.” Many students also reported that they perceived much of their homework to be busywork and that it did not help them to learn the material. When teachers focus on what matters most, they can reduce unhealthy workloads and can help students see the meaning behind what they are learning each day.

5. Offer more student-selected, authentic learning experiences.

As Lauren, a 10th grader from Virginia, described a website she developed for a nonprofit during remote learning, her whole face lit up with joy. Her teacher was looking for volunteers and knew Lauren had an interest in coding. With this project, she got to learn by doing. She shared, “I learned so much in [those] last two months that I never would have been able to learn in the classroom. Being able to deep dive into web development has been amazing for me. I’ve loved connecting with real-world groups and actually doing an assignment that is contributing to something.”

Allowing students to have voice and choice with their assignments and incorporating opportunities to address real-world problems or create products for authentic audiences can motivate students to do higher quality work. As Soren noted, “I have been able to use a wider variety of resources to learn concepts, while still gaining the same information. I’ve been more interested in learning because it is more personal.”

Eliot, a 10th grader from Texas, described an assignment where students were asked to investigate how the CDC uses mathematical models to chart the spread of COVID-19. Showing the practical relevance of a particular math unit made it much more interesting to the students than teaching it as an isolated concept. Eliot summed it up well, “When work feels meaningful and relevant, I am more engaged.”

Amber, an 11th grader from Virginia, was given some assignments that were optional and ungraded. For some students, this policy, along with alternate forms of assessment such as open note tests, peer review, and increased opportunities for revision and redemption, helped teens to engage in learning for the sake of learning, not just for the grades. Other students found the lack of extrinsic motivation very challenging and were not completing their work. Educators can use this as an opportunity to talk to students about why learning matters for the long-term and collaborate with students to design lessons that they are motivated to complete. Amber suggests that her teachers look at which assignments students did during this time period – and which they left undone; “If [teachers] can learn from the projects that students choose to do, this will help our learning experience be more about the learning rather than a boring assignment we do just for the sake of doing it. If there’s one thing I hope educators take away from this time, it’s to bring the love for learning itself back into the curriculum.”

All five of these guiding principles are validated by research and are likely not new ideas to most educators. But hearing them directly from students during this potentially transformational moment for our educational system serves as an important opportunity for reflection. We encourage schools to invest time in these first few weeks of school to listen deeply to the students. Conduct a survey to find out what worked and did not work for them during remote learning. Gather a small group of students for a fishbowl and dive deeper into their reflections about this unique time. Shadow students by following their synchronous and asynchronous learning schedules. Conduct an “I Wish” campaign asking students to share what they wish teachers knew about this unique school experience. Then, embrace those learnings as you redesign and reimagine what you can offer students that best supports their journey to become balanced, healthy, and engaged learners — wherever that learning is happening.

Denise Pope, Ph.D., is a Co-Founder of Challenge Success and a Senior Lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education, where she specializes in student engagement, curriculum studies, qualitative research methods, and service learning. She is the author of, “Doing School”: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students, and co-author of Overloaded and Underprepared: Strategies for Stronger Schools and Healthy, Successful Kids. Dr. Pope lectures nationally on parenting techniques and pedagogical strategies to increase student health, engagement with learning, and integrity. 

• Research article
• Open access
• Published: 15 February 2018

Blended learning: the new normal and emerging technologies

• Charles Dziuban 1 ,
• Charles R. Graham 2 ,
• Patsy D. Moskal   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6376-839X 1 ,
• Anders Norberg 3 &
• Nicole Sicilia 1  

International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education volume  15 , Article number:  3 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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This study addressed several outcomes, implications, and possible future directions for blended learning (BL) in higher education in a world where information communication technologies (ICTs) increasingly communicate with each other. In considering effectiveness, the authors contend that BL coalesces around access, success, and students’ perception of their learning environments. Success and withdrawal rates for face-to-face and online courses are compared to those for BL as they interact with minority status. Investigation of student perception about course excellence revealed the existence of robust if-then decision rules for determining how students evaluate their educational experiences. Those rules were independent of course modality, perceived content relevance, and expected grade. The authors conclude that although blended learning preceded modern instructional technologies, its evolution will be inextricably bound to contemporary information communication technologies that are approximating some aspects of human thought processes.

Introduction

Blended learning and research issues.

Blended learning (BL), or the integration of face-to-face and online instruction (Graham 2013 ), is widely adopted across higher education with some scholars referring to it as the “new traditional model” (Ross and Gage 2006 , p. 167) or the “new normal” in course delivery (Norberg et al. 2011 , p. 207). However, tracking the accurate extent of its growth has been challenging because of definitional ambiguity (Oliver and Trigwell 2005 ), combined with institutions’ inability to track an innovative practice, that in many instances has emerged organically. One early nationwide study sponsored by the Sloan Consortium (now the Online Learning Consortium) found that 65.2% of participating institutions of higher education (IHEs) offered blended (also termed hybrid ) courses (Allen and Seaman 2003 ). A 2008 study, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education to explore distance education in the U.S., defined BL as “a combination of online and in-class instruction with reduced in-class seat time for students ” (Lewis and Parsad 2008 , p. 1, emphasis added). Using this definition, the study found that 35% of higher education institutions offered blended courses, and that 12% of the 12.2 million documented distance education enrollments were in blended courses.

The 2017 New Media Consortium Horizon Report found that blended learning designs were one of the short term forces driving technology adoption in higher education in the next 1–2 years (Adams Becker et al. 2017 ). Also, blended learning is one of the key issues in teaching and learning in the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s 2017 annual survey of higher education (EDUCAUSE 2017 ). As institutions begin to examine BL instruction, there is a growing research interest in exploring the implications for both faculty and students. This modality is creating a community of practice built on a singular and pervasive research question, “How is blended learning impacting the teaching and learning environment?” That question continues to gain traction as investigators study the complexities of how BL interacts with cognitive, affective, and behavioral components of student behavior, and examine its transformation potential for the academy. Those issues are so compelling that several volumes have been dedicated to assembling the research on how blended learning can be better understood (Dziuban et al. 2016 ; Picciano et al. 2014 ; Picciano and Dziuban 2007 ; Bonk and Graham 2007 ; Kitchenham 2011 ; Jean-François 2013 ; Garrison and Vaughan 2013 ) and at least one organization, the Online Learning Consortium, sponsored an annual conference solely dedicated to blended learning at all levels of education and training (2004–2015). These initiatives address blended learning in a wide variety of situations. For instance, the contexts range over K-12 education, industrial and military training, conceptual frameworks, transformational potential, authentic assessment, and new research models. Further, many of these resources address students’ access, success, withdrawal, and perception of the degree to which blended learning provides an effective learning environment.

Currently the United States faces a widening educational gap between our underserved student population and those communities with greater financial and technological resources (Williams 2016 ). Equal access to education is a critical need, one that is particularly important for those in our underserved communities. Can blended learning help increase access thereby alleviating some of the issues faced by our lower income students while resulting in improved educational equality? Although most indicators suggest “yes” (Dziuban et al. 2004 ), it seems that, at the moment, the answer is still “to be determined.” Quality education presents a challenge, evidenced by many definitions of what constitutes its fundamental components (Pirsig 1974 ; Arum et al. 2016 ). Although progress has been made by initiatives, such as, Quality Matters ( 2016 ), the OLC OSCQR Course Design Review Scorecard developed by Open SUNY (Open SUNY n.d. ), the Quality Scorecard for Blended Learning Programs (Online Learning Consortium n.d. ), and SERVQUAL (Alhabeeb 2015 ), the issue is by no means resolved. Generally, we still make quality education a perceptual phenomenon where we ascribe that attribute to a course, educational program, or idea, but struggle with precisely why we reached that decision. Searle ( 2015 ), summarizes the problem concisely arguing that quality does not exist independently, but is entirely observer dependent. Pirsig ( 1974 ) in his iconic volume on the nature of quality frames the context this way,

“There is such thing as Quality, but that as soon as you try to define it, something goes haywire. You can’t do it” (p. 91).

Therefore, attempting to formulate a semantic definition of quality education with syntax-based metrics results in what O’Neil (O'Neil 2017 ) terms surrogate models that are rough approximations and oversimplified. Further, the derived metrics tend to morph into goals or benchmarks, losing their original measurement properties (Goodhart 1975 ).

Information communication technologies in society and education

Blended learning forces us to consider the characteristics of digital technology, in general, and information communication technologies (ICTs), more specifically. Floridi ( 2014 ) suggests an answer proffered by Alan Turing: that digital ICTs can process information on their own, in some sense just as humans and other biological life. ICTs can also communicate information to each other, without human intervention, but as linked processes designed by humans. We have evolved to the point where humans are not always “in the loop” of technology, but should be “on the loop” (Floridi 2014 , p. 30), designing and adapting the process. We perceive our world more and more in informational terms, and not primarily as physical entities (Floridi 2008 ). Increasingly, the educational world is dominated by information and our economies rest primarily on that asset. So our world is also blended, and it is blended so much that we hardly see the individual components of the blend any longer. Floridi ( 2014 ) argues that the world has become an “infosphere” (like biosphere) where we live as “inforgs.” What is real for us is shifting from the physical and unchangeable to those things with which we can interact.

Floridi also helps us to identify the next blend in education, involving ICTs, or specialized artificial intelligence (Floridi 2014 , 25; Norberg 2017 , 65). Learning analytics, adaptive learning, calibrated peer review, and automated essay scoring (Balfour 2013 ) are advanced processes that, provided they are good interfaces, can work well with the teacher— allowing him or her to concentrate on human attributes such as being caring, creative, and engaging in problem-solving. This can, of course, as with all technical advancements, be used to save resources and augment the role of the teacher. For instance, if artificial intelligence can be used to work along with teachers, allowing them more time for personal feedback and mentoring with students, then, we will have made a transformational breakthrough. The Edinburg University manifesto for teaching online says bravely, “Automation need not impoverish education – we welcome our robot colleagues” (Bayne et al. 2016 ). If used wisely, they will teach us more about ourselves, and about what is truly human in education. This emerging blend will also affect curricular and policy questions, such as the what? and what for? The new normal for education will be in perpetual flux. Floridi’s ( 2014 ) philosophy offers us tools to understand and be in control and not just sit by and watch what happens. In many respects, he has addressed the new normal for blended learning.

Literature of blended learning

A number of investigators have assembled a comprehensive agenda of transformative and innovative research issues for blended learning that have the potential to enhance effectiveness (Garrison and Kanuka 2004 ; Picciano 2009 ). Generally, research has found that BL results in improvement in student success and satisfaction, (Dziuban and Moskal 2011 ; Dziuban et al. 2011 ; Means et al. 2013 ) as well as an improvement in students’ sense of community (Rovai and Jordan 2004 ) when compared with face-to-face courses. Those who have been most successful at blended learning initiatives stress the importance of institutional support for course redesign and planning (Moskal et al. 2013 ; Dringus and Seagull 2015 ; Picciano 2009 ; Tynan et al. 2015 ). The evolving research questions found in the literature are long and demanding, with varied definitions of what constitutes “blended learning,” facilitating the need for continued and in-depth research on instructional models and support needed to maximize achievement and success (Dringus and Seagull 2015 ; Bloemer and Swan 2015 ).

Educational access

The lack of access to educational technologies and innovations (sometimes termed the digital divide) continues to be a challenge with novel educational technologies (Fairlie 2004 ; Jones et al. 2009 ). One of the promises of online technologies is that they can increase access to nontraditional and underserved students by bringing a host of educational resources and experiences to those who may have limited access to on-campus-only higher education. A 2010 U.S. report shows that students with low socioeconomic status are less likely to obtain higher levels of postsecondary education (Aud et al. 2010 ). However, the increasing availability of distance education has provided educational opportunities to millions (Lewis and Parsad 2008 ; Allen et al. 2016 ). Additionally, an emphasis on open educational resources (OER) in recent years has resulted in significant cost reductions without diminishing student performance outcomes (Robinson et al. 2014 ; Fischer et al. 2015 ; Hilton et al. 2016 ).

Unfortunately, the benefits of access may not be experienced evenly across demographic groups. A 2015 study found that Hispanic and Black STEM majors were significantly less likely to take online courses even when controlling for academic preparation, socioeconomic status (SES), citizenship, and English as a second language (ESL) status (Wladis et al. 2015 ). Also, questions have been raised about whether the additional access afforded by online technologies has actually resulted in improved outcomes for underserved populations. A distance education report in California found that all ethnic minorities (except Asian/Pacific Islanders) completed distance education courses at a lower rate than the ethnic majority (California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office 2013 ). Shea and Bidjerano ( 2014 , 2016 ) found that African American community college students who took distance education courses completed degrees at significantly lower rates than those who did not take distance education courses. On the other hand, a study of success factors in K-12 online learning found that for ethnic minorities, only 1 out of 15 courses had significant gaps in student test scores (Liu and Cavanaugh 2011 ). More research needs to be conducted, examining access and success rates for different populations, when it comes to learning in different modalities, including fully online and blended learning environments.

Framing a treatment effect

Over the last decade, there have been at least five meta-analyses that have addressed the impact of blended learning environments and its relationship to learning effectiveness (Zhao et al. 2005 ; Sitzmann et al. 2006 ; Bernard et al. 2009 ; Means et al. 2010 , 2013 ; Bernard et al. 2014 ). Each of these studies has found small to moderate positive effect sizes in favor of blended learning when compared to fully online or traditional face-to-face environments. However, there are several considerations inherent in these studies that impact our understanding the generalizability of outcomes.

Dziuban and colleagues (Dziuban et al. 2015 ) analyzed the meta-analyses conducted by Means and her colleagues (Means et al. 2013 ; Means et al. 2010 ), concluding that their methods were impressive as evidenced by exhaustive study inclusion criteria and the use of scale-free effect size indices. The conclusion, in both papers, was that there was a modest difference in multiple outcome measures for courses featuring online modalities—in particular, blended courses. However, with blended learning especially, there are some concerns with these kinds of studies. First, the effect sizes are based on the linear hypothesis testing model with the underlying assumption that the treatment and the error terms are uncorrelated, indicating that there is nothing else going on in the blending that might confound the results. Although the blended learning articles (Means et al. 2010 ) were carefully vetted, the assumption of independence is tenuous at best so that these meta-analysis studies must be interpreted with extreme caution.

There is an additional concern with blended learning as well. Blends are not equivalent because of the manner on which they are configured. For instance, a careful reading of the sources used in the Means, et al. papers will identify, at minimum, the following blending techniques: laboratory assessments, online instruction, e-mail, class web sites, computer laboratories, mapping and scaffolding tools, computer clusters, interactive presentations and e-mail, handwriting capture, evidence-based practice, electronic portfolios, learning management systems, and virtual apparatuses. These are not equivalent ways in which to configure courses, and such nonequivalence constitutes the confounding we describe. We argue here that, in actuality, blended learning is a general construct in the form of a boundary object (Star and Griesemer 1989 ) rather than a treatment effect in the statistical sense. That is, an idea or concept that can support a community of practice, but is weakly defined fostering disagreement in the general group. Conversely, it is stronger in individual constituencies. For instance, content disciplines (i.e. education, rhetoric, optics, mathematics, and philosophy) formulate a more precise definition because of commonly embraced teaching and learning principles. Quite simply, the situation is more complicated than that, as Leonard Smith ( 2007 ) says after Tolstoy,

“All linear models resemble each other, each non nonlinear system is unique in its own way” (p. 33).

This by no means invalidates these studies, but effect size associated with blended learning should be interpreted with caution where the impact is evaluated within a particular learning context.

Study objectives

This study addressed student access by examining success and withdrawal rates in the blended learning courses by comparing them to face-to-face and online modalities over an extended time period at the University of Central Florida. Further, the investigators sought to assess the differences in those success and withdrawal rates with the minority status of students. Secondly, the investigators examined the student end-of-course ratings of blended learning and other modalities by attempting to develop robust if-then decision rules about what characteristics of classes and instructors lead students to assign an “excellent” value to their educational experience. Because of the high stakes nature of these student ratings toward faculty promotion, awards, and tenure, they act as a surrogate measure for instructional quality. Next, the investigators determined the conditional probabilities for students conforming to the identified rule cross-referenced by expected grade, the degree to which they desired to take the course, and course modality.

Student grades by course modality were recoded into a binary variable with C or higher assigned a value of 1, and remaining values a 0. This was a declassification process that sacrificed some specificity but compensated for confirmation bias associated with disparate departmental policies regarding grade assignment. At the measurement level this was an “on track to graduation index” for students. Withdrawal was similarly coded by the presence or absence of its occurrence. In each case, the percentage of students succeeding or withdrawing from blended, online or face-to-face courses was calculated by minority and non-minority status for the fall 2014 through fall 2015 semesters.

Next, a classification and regression tree (CART) analysis (Brieman et al. 1984 ) was performed on the student end-of-course evaluation protocol ( Appendix 1 ). The dependent measure was a binary variable indicating whether or not a student assigned an overall rating of excellent to his or her course experience. The independent measures in the study were: the remaining eight rating items on the protocol, college membership, and course level (lower undergraduate, upper undergraduate, and graduate). Decision trees are efficient procedures for achieving effective solutions in studies such as this because with missing values imputation may be avoided with procedures such as floating methods and the surrogate formation (Brieman et al. 1984 , Olshen et al. 1995 ). For example, a logistic regression method cannot efficiently handle all variables under consideration. There are 10 independent variables involved here; one variable has three levels, another has nine, and eight have five levels each. This means the logistic regression model must incorporate more than 50 dummy variables and an excessively large number of two-way interactions. However, the decision-tree method can perform this analysis very efficiently, permitting the investigator to consider higher order interactions. Even more importantly, decision trees represent appropriate methods in this situation because many of the variables are ordinally scaled. Although numerical values can be assigned to each category, those values are not unique. However, decision trees incorporate the ordinal component of the variables to obtain a solution. The rules derived from decision trees have an if-then structure that is readily understandable. The accuracy of these rules can be assessed with percentages of correct classification or odds-ratios that are easily understood. The procedure produces tree-like rule structures that predict outcomes.

The model-building procedure for predicting overall instructor rating

For this study, the investigators used the CART method (Brieman et al. 1984 ) executed with SPSS 23 (IBM Corp 2015 ). Because of its strong variance-sharing tendencies with the other variables, the dependent measure for the analysis was the rating on the item Overall Rating of the Instructor , with the previously mentioned indicator variables (college, course level, and the remaining 8 questions) on the instrument. Tree methods are recursive, and bisect data into subgroups called nodes or leaves. CART analysis bases itself on: data splitting, pruning, and homogeneous assessment.

Splitting the data into two (binary) subsets comprises the first stage of the process. CART continues to split the data until the frequencies in each subset are either very small or all observations in a subset belong to one category (e.g., all observations in a subset have the same rating). Usually the growing stage results in too many terminate nodes for the model to be useful. CART solves this problem using pruning methods that reduce the dimensionality of the system.

The final stage of the analysis involves assessing homogeneousness in growing and pruning the tree. One way to accomplish this is to compute the misclassification rates. For example, a rule that produces a .95 probability that an instructor will receive an excellent rating has an associated error of 5.0%.

Implications for using decision trees

Although decision-tree techniques are effective for analyzing datasets such as this, the reader should be aware of certain limitations. For example, since trees use ranks to analyze both ordinal and interval variables, information can be lost. However, the most serious weakness of decision tree analysis is that the results can be unstable because small initial variations can lead to substantially different solutions.

For this study model, these problems were addressed with the k-fold cross-validation process. Initially the dataset was partitioned randomly into 10 subsets with an approximately equal number of records in each subset. Each cohort is used as a test partition, and the remaining subsets are combined to complete the function. This produces 10 models that are all trained on different subsets of the original dataset and where each has been used as the test partition one time only.

Although computationally dense, CART was selected as the analysis model for a number of reasons— primarily because it provides easily interpretable rules that readers will be able evaluate in their particular contexts. Unlike many other multivariate procedures that are even more sensitive to initial estimates and require a good deal of statistical sophistication for interpretation, CART has an intuitive resonance with researcher consumers. The overriding objective of our choice of analysis methods was to facilitate readers’ concentration on our outcomes rather than having to rely on our interpretation of the results.

Institution-level evaluation: Success and withdrawal

The University of Central Florida (UCF) began a longitudinal impact study of their online and blended courses at the start of the distributed learning initiative in 1996. The collection of similar data across multiple semesters and academic years has allowed UCF to monitor trends, assess any issues that may arise, and provide continual support for both faculty and students across varying demographics. Table  1 illustrates the overall success rates in blended, online and face-to-face courses, while also reporting their variability across minority and non-minority demographics.

While success (A, B, or C grade) is not a direct reflection of learning outcomes, this overview does provide an institutional level indication of progress and possible issues of concern. BL has a slight advantage when looking at overall success and withdrawal rates. This varies by discipline and course, but generally UCF’s blended modality has evolved to be the best of both worlds, providing an opportunity for optimizing face-to-face instruction through the effective use of online components. These gains hold true across minority status. Reducing on-ground time also addresses issues that impact both students and faculty such as parking and time to reach class. In addition, UCF requires faculty to go through faculty development tailored to teaching in either blended or online modalities. This 8-week faculty development course is designed to model blended learning, encouraging faculty to redesign their course and not merely consider blended learning as a means to move face-to-face instructional modules online (Cobb et al. 2012 ; Lowe 2013 ).

Withdrawal (Table  2 ) from classes impedes students’ success and retention and can result in delayed time to degree, incurred excess credit hour fees, or lost scholarships and financial aid. Although grades are only a surrogate measure for learning, they are a strong predictor of college completion. Therefore, the impact of any new innovation on students’ grades should be a component of any evaluation. Once again, the blended modality is competitive and in some cases results in lower overall withdrawal rates than either fully online or face-to-face courses.

The students’ perceptions of their learning environments

Other potentially high-stakes indicators can be measured to determine the impact of an innovation such as blended learning on the academy. For instance, student satisfaction and attitudes can be measured through data collection protocols, including common student ratings, or student perception of instruction instruments. Given that those ratings often impact faculty evaluation, any negative reflection can derail the successful implementation and scaling of an innovation by disenfranchised instructors. In fact, early online and blended courses created a request by the UCF faculty senate to investigate their impact on faculty ratings as compared to face-to-face sections. The UCF Student Perception of Instruction form is released automatically online through the campus web portal near the end of each semester. Students receive a splash page with a link to each course’s form. Faculty receive a scripted email that they can send to students indicating the time period that the ratings form will be available. The forms close at the beginning of finals week. Faculty receive a summary of their results following the semester end.

The instrument used for this study was developed over a ten year period by the faculty senate of the University of Central Florida, recognizing the evolution of multiple course modalities including blended learning. The process involved input from several constituencies on campus (students, faculty, administrators, instructional designers, and others), in attempt to provide useful formative and summative instructional information to the university community. The final instrument was approved by resolution of the senate and, currently, is used across the university. Students’ rating of their classes and instructors comes with considerable controversy and disagreement with researchers aligning themselves on both sides of the issue. Recently, there have been a number of studies criticizing the process (Uttl et al. 2016 ; Boring et al. 2016 ; & Stark and Freishtat 2014 ). In spite of this discussion, a viable alternative has yet to emerge in higher education. So in the foreseeable future, the process is likely to continue. Therefore, with an implied faculty senate mandate this study was initiated by this team of researchers.

Prior to any analysis of the item responses collected in this campus-wide student sample, the psychometric quality (domain sampling) of the information yielded by the instrument was assessed. Initially, the reliability (internal consistency) was derived using coefficient alpha (Cronbach 1951 ). In addition, Guttman ( 1953 ) developed a theorem about item properties that leads to evidence about the quality of one’s data, demonstrating that as the domain sampling properties of items improve, the inverse of the correlation matrix among items will approach a diagonal. Subsequently, Kaiser and Rice ( 1974 ) developed the measure of sampling adequacy (MSA) that is a function of the Guttman Theorem. The index has an upper bound of one with Kaiser offering some decision rules for interpreting the value of MSA. If the value of the index is in the .80 to .99 range, the investigator has evidence of an excellent domain sample. Values in the .70s signal an acceptable result, and those in the .60s indicate data that are unacceptable. Customarily, the MSA has been used for data assessment prior to the application of any dimensionality assessments. Computation of the MSA value gave the investigators a benchmark for the construct validity of the items in this study. This procedure has been recommended by Dziuban and Shirkey ( 1974 ) prior to any latent dimension analysis and was used with the data obtained for this study. The MSA for the current instrument was .98 suggesting excellent domain sampling properties with an associated alpha reliability coefficient of .97 suggesting superior internal consistency. The psychometric properties of the instrument were excellent with both measures.

The online student ratings form presents an electronic data set each semester. These can be merged across time to create a larger data set of completed ratings for every course across each semester. In addition, captured data includes course identification variables including prefix, number, section and semester, department, college, faculty, and class size. The overall rating of effectiveness is used most heavily by departments and faculty in comparing across courses and modalities (Table  3 ).

The finally derived tree (decision rules) included only three variables—survey items that asked students to rate the instructor’s effectiveness at:

Helping students achieve course objectives,

Creating an environment that helps students learn, and

Communicating ideas and information.

None of the demographic variables associated with the courses contributed to the final model. The final rule specifies that if a student assigns an excellent rating to those three items, irrespective of their status on any other condition, the probability is .99 that an instructor will receive an overall rating of excellent. The converse is true as well. A poor rating on all three of those items will lead to a 99% chance of an instructor receiving an overall rating of poor.

Tables  4 , 5 and 6 present a demonstration of the robustness of the CART rule for variables on which it was not developed: expected course grade, desire to take the course and modality.

In each case, irrespective of the marginal probabilities, those students conforming to the rule have a virtually 100% chance of seeing the course as excellent. For instance, 27% of all students expecting to fail assigned an excellent rating to their courses, but when they conformed to the rule the percentage rose to 97%. The same finding is true when students were asked about their desire to take the course with those who strongly disagreed assigning excellent ratings to their courses 26% of the time. However, for those conforming to the rule, that category rose to 92%. When course modality is considered in the marginal sense, blended learning is rated as the preferred choice. However, from Table  6 we can observe that the rule equates student assessment of their learning experiences. If they conform to the rule, they will see excellence.

This study addressed increasingly important issues of student success, withdrawal and perception of the learning environment across multiple course modalities. Arguably these components form the crux of how we will make more effective decisions about how blended learning configures itself in the new normal. The results reported here indicate that blending maintains or increases access for most student cohorts and produces improved success rates for minority and non-minority students alike. In addition, when students express their beliefs about the effectiveness of their learning environments, blended learning enjoys the number one rank. However, upon more thorough analysis of key elements students view as important in their learning, external and demographic variables have minimal impact on those decisions. For example college (i.e. discipline) membership, course level or modality, expected grade or desire to take a particular course have little to do with their course ratings. The characteristics they view as important relate to clear establishment and progress toward course objectives, creating an effective learning environment and the instructors’ effective communication. If in their view those three elements of a course are satisfied they are virtually guaranteed to evaluate their educational experience as excellent irrespective of most other considerations. While end of course rating protocols are summative the three components have clear formative characteristics in that each one is directly related to effective pedagogy and is responsive to faculty development through units such as the faculty center for teaching and learning. We view these results as encouraging because they offer potential for improving the teaching and learning process in an educational environment that increases the pressure to become more responsive to contemporary student lifestyles.

Clearly, in this study we are dealing with complex adaptive systems that feature the emergent property. That is, their primary agents and their interactions comprise an environment that is more than the linear combination of their individual elements. Blending learning, by interacting with almost every aspect of higher education, provides opportunities and challenges that we are not able to fully anticipate.

This pedagogy alters many assumptions about the most effective way to support the educational environment. For instance, blending, like its counterpart active learning, is a personal and individual phenomenon experienced by students. Therefore, it should not be surprising that much of what we have called blended learning is, in reality, blended teaching that reflects pedagogical arrangements. Actually, the best we can do for assessing impact is to use surrogate measures such as success, grades, results of assessment protocols, and student testimony about their learning experiences. Whether or not such devices are valid indicators remains to be determined. We may be well served, however, by changing our mode of inquiry to blended teaching.

Additionally, as Norberg ( 2017 ) points out, blended learning is not new. The modality dates back, at least, to the medieval period when the technology of textbooks was introduced into the classroom where, traditionally, the professor read to the students from the only existing manuscript. Certainly, like modern technologies, books were disruptive because they altered the teaching and learning paradigm. Blended learning might be considered what Johnson describes as a slow hunch (2010). That is, an idea that evolved over a long period of time, achieving what Kaufmann ( 2000 ) describes as the adjacent possible – a realistic next step occurring in many iterations.

The search for a definition for blended learning has been productive, challenging, and, at times, daunting. The definitional continuum is constrained by Oliver and Trigwell ( 2005 ) castigation of the concept for its imprecise vagueness to Sharpe et al.’s ( 2006 ) notion that its definitional latitude enhances contextual relevance. Both extremes alter boundaries such as time, place, presence, learning hierarchies, and space. The disagreement leads us to conclude that Lakoff’s ( 2012 ) idealized cognitive models i.e. arbitrarily derived concepts (of which blended learning might be one) are necessary if we are to function effectively. However, the strong possibility exists that blended learning, like quality, is observer dependent and may not exist outside of our perceptions of the concept. This, of course, circles back to the problem of assuming that blending is a treatment effect for point hypothesis testing and meta-analysis.

Ultimately, in this article, we have tried to consider theoretical concepts and empirical findings about blended learning and their relationship to the new normal as it evolves. Unfortunately, like unresolved chaotic solutions, we cannot be sure that there is an attractor or that it will be the new normal. That being said, it seems clear that blended learning is the harbinger of substantial change in higher education and will become equally impactful in K-12 schooling and industrial training. Blended learning, because of its flexibility, allows us to maximize many positive education functions. If Floridi ( 2014 ) is correct and we are about to live in an environment where we are on the communication loop rather than in it, our educational future is about to change. However, if our results are correct and not over fit to the University of Central Florida and our theoretical speculations have some validity, the future of blended learning should encourage us about the coming changes.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the contributions of several investigators and course developers from the Center for Distributed Learning at the University of Central Florida, the McKay School of Education at Brigham Young University, and Scholars at Umea University, Sweden. These professionals contributed theoretical and practical ideas to this research project and carefully reviewed earlier versions of this manuscript. The Authors gratefully acknowledge their support and assistance.

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Student Perception of Instruction

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Dziuban, C., Graham, C.R., Moskal, P.D. et al. Blended learning: the new normal and emerging technologies. Int J Educ Technol High Educ 15 , 3 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-017-0087-5

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• Blended learning
• Higher education
• Student success
• Student perception of instruction