Conference Agenda

Online learning is often discussed in relation to what happens on the screen of the computer, tablet, or phone, which students are accessing the learning through. This can be seen to reflect ‘Cartesian approaches that separate mind from body’ (Dourish, 2001: 189), reflective of wider education discourses in the western world. The reality is that online learning is happening in a physical place and experienced bodily as well as cognitively, our eyes get tired from computer screens and our backs sore from spending too long sitting. In this critical re-imagining we draw on research which understands learning to be a socially, culturally, and physically, situated practice. We focus on the webinar, a synchronous online teaching activity, in which geographically distributed groups of lecturers and students participate in learning activities together. We teach on an international Master of Education programme, working with diverse groups of students, and have become increasingly aware of the different physical, social, and cultural locations in which they are situated. We take the pedagogic stance that webinars should provide opportunities for collaborative learning and use two conceptual lens’ to critically examine how this can be facilitated.

We use two conceptual lens’ to examine educational practice in webinars: Mediation and Embodied Cognition. A sociocultural understanding of mediation (Wertsch, 2007) allows us to consider the ways in which digital technology enables and constrains the learning experience. For international students’ digital technology enables connection to the university and to the module content, to the lecturer and to other students. The concept of mediation enables us to examine the way digital technology frames and constrains this learning experience. Embodied cognition (Johnson, 2013, Shapiro, 2014) deepens this examination by allowing us to ‘see’ the student as an embodied individual, experiencing education from a specific place. This enables us to explore further than the boundaries of the digital technology and critically consider the physical and cultural spaces which students inhabit as they engage with online learning. When teaching live sessions on international modules different time zones, geographic areas and cultural expectations are juxtaposed. Some students may have stayed up late, while others have got up early. Students in the same webinar may be experiencing extremes of weather or very different cultural environments. It is this juxtaposition that provides the potential for rich learning in webinars but too often not all students fully participate, or even attend. Drawing on both mediation and embodied cognition we consider the experience of the webinar and then highlight the implications of this conceptual framing for practice.

The conceptual analysis we present is grounded in empirical data, collected during an action research style scoping study which tracked the development of a pedagogic intervention. Physical artefacts were introduced to webinar tasks as a means to value the knowledge structures of the students, enable collaborative practice and support the embodied experience of learning. Our reflections imply that the use of artefacts creates sensorimotor experiences which can support learning. In recognising that cognition is embodied, providing sensorimotor opportunities becomes a necessity in supporting individual learners but more than this, by sharing these activities within a group, there is further potential for broader and deeper thinking through the provision of space to ‘offload’. Offloading supports confidence and the creation of new understandings. Where students are able to sense each others’ sensorimotor activity during the use and production of artefacts, motor equivalence and ‘mirroring’ are enabled, generating empathy amongst the group and allowing students to reflect on and add to their own experiences. This suggests that consideration of the embodied experience of the student is pertinent when reflecting on the development of online pedagogy.

The pandemic 2020 drew a “waterline” between two concepts — “Emergency Remote Teaching” (ERT) and “High-Quality (Effective) Online Learning” (Hodges et al., 2020). ERT is considered to be “the temporary transition of learning to an alternative mode of content delivery due to crisis circumstances”. In 2021 Melissa Bond, Svenja Bedenlier et al. captured significant attention worldwide in the review that collected and synthesised the findings of 282 primary empirical studies conducted by 1019 authors from 73 countries during the initial 10 months of the pandemic. The compelling results of their research highlighted crucial insights that resonated across the globe.

One of the negative consequences of ERT was the problem of psychological distress. Therefore, the Yandex conducted a large-scale all-Russian study in 2020, specifically examining the emotional burnout experienced by school teachers. The findings revealed that 75% of participants displayed evident symptoms of burnout, with 38% of teachers being in the acute phase.

The “Hybrid” training format has also made its adjustments to the problem and has become widespread along with such training formats as “Face-to-Face” and “Remote/Virtual” but more than 90% of teachers recognise a digital disadvantage associated with the “Hybrid” format that makes a teaching-learning process more time-consuming. On the other hand, several studies indicate a shift away from the traditional classroom format in the educational process. This trend signifies a decline in the dominant position that the classroom format has held for centuries. In 2022, A.A. Margolis et al. showed that among the students of the Moscow State University of Psyсhology and Education (N = 761), only 10.8% of them preferred the full-time (classroom) study format. The distance learning format ranked first, with 49.5% of participants selecting it, while the mixed format claimed the second position with a preference of 39.7%. The research project led by E.I. Kazakova and I.E. Kondrakova involved students from 30 Russian universities (N = 4558) representing 23 regions of Russia revealed that students perceive distance learning as a means to fulfill their need for personal subjectivity and to take the initiative in educational activities.

Meanwhile, a study conducted by A.V. Filkina et al. on Russian universities students (N = 25400 students, 2021) using the “Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-8)” method revealed blended learning is linked to a higher likelihood of experiencing signs of psychological distress among students.

According to the researchers, the analysis of the relationship between the learning format and the occurrence of psychological distress symptoms shows ambiguous results that students who exclusively study in a distance-learning format present the lowest levels of psychological distress. Full-time education slightly increases the likelihood of experiencing distress symptoms. At the same time, most often signs of psychological distress are observed in students studying in a mixed format, when some classes are held full-time, some remotely.

However, the experiences gained during the pandemic and post-pandemic periods indicate that the alternative to ERT in the form of High-Quality Online Learning has the potential to yield excellent educational outcomes and is linked to psychological well-being. An experiment conducted on younger schoolchildren demonstrated that remote synchronous classes aimed at fostering creativity are equally effective, if not superior, to traditional classroom sessions, debunking existing social stereotypes. The experimental group exhibited slightly higher creativity scores compared to the control groups (L.E. Jalalova, R.V. Komarov). Similar positive educational outcomes have been achieved across various levels of education, including distance Master's degree programmes, advanced training courses, and professional retraining programmes. Therefore, the question of utmost importance in the post-pandemic period is what conditions guarantee the success of remote teaching (including digital formats) and promote the students digital well-being.

In Activating Blended Education (ABE), online and in person education are combined (Bowyer & Chambers, 2017) and students have to actively learn through exercises and meetings that are activating in nature, such as tutorials and discussions. ABE has increasingly been applied in higher education since the early 2000s in Europe and the United States (Güzer & Caner, 2014) and increasingly in the rest of the world (Anthony et al, 2020). After the Covid-19 pandemic, it has even been described as a new normal (Cobo-Rendón et al., 2022; Singh et al., 2021).

Multiple meta-analyses have found that ABE leads to better academic results than education that takes place entirely on campus or online (Bernard et al., 2014; Castro, 2019; Vho et al., 2017). Online contents gives students greater flexibility and the opportunity to learn at their own pace (Boelens et al,. 2018) and activating educational methods force students to cognitively engage with teaching materials long before a final exam. ABE can implemented in different ways. An instructor could for example choose for a flipped classroom setting in which instruction takes place via prerecorded lectures and meetings on location are used for clarification and discussion. It is also possible to make a course blended by adding online modules to a courses.

ABE has been extensively studied but most research has focused on detailed analysis of single courses and curricula (Anthony et al., 2022) often given by proponents of ABE. Research into institutional adoption of ABE is rare and often relies on interviews with higher management rather than a measurement of the actual instruction offered in higher education (Graham et al., 2022) As the adoption of ABE becomes more widespread, it becomes necessary to study how ABE is adopted institutionally and measure whether and how ABE is implemented through analysis of the actual education offered to the students.

The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) adopted ABE as one of the design principles for its education in 2021. It is yet unclear whether the university truly achieved a greater level of blended and activating education and to ascertain whether this is the case, a mixed method research project has been started. For this study, a stratified sample was taken of Bachelor courses for which the content was analysed through the schedule and online learning environment. Interviews were conducted with course coordinators on the rationale for their course design.

We aim to answer the following research questions. 1) how can we efficiently and validly ascertain whether a course is blended and activating? 2) How is ABE designed? 3) Is there a shift towards more ABE in the period 2019-2024?

With a newly developed measuring instrument, over 150 courses were successfully analysed. The analysed courses were to a great degree activating but to a far smaller degree blended. Apart from a small minority of 10% of the sample, all courses had numerous assignments and meetings that are activating in nature. The courses that were blended were so because of a greater focus on online videos and modules rather than online meetings. In 2019-2020, all instruction took place on campus and during the Covid-19 pandemic all instruction moved online. After the pandemic, in 2022-2023, only a small number of courses had retained online activities. Online meetings were generally limited to one per course and do no constitute a significant part of the instruction. There was also an increase in online videos, quizzes and exercises. In interviews, teachers were generally positive about ABE but at the same time strongly preferred to have in person meetings.

The digital public sphere, comprised of a wide variety of message boards, information outlets, discussion fora and news channels, all enabled via social media and the world wide web, has on paper at least enormous potential to encourage the development of what Habermas referred to as a ‘critical reasoning public’ (1989). This is a public that, just as in the heyday of the 18^th public sphere, held nation states to account and spoke truth to power – the public sphere effectively acting as a check on undemocratic practices. The reality, based on recent evidence, is that the public sphere of the 21st century has squandered this potential, with critical reasoning in short supply and struggling to make itself felt in a world of celebrity gossip and antagonistic behaviour. Online dialogue is a world away from a digital republic of letters and the genesis of a new age of enlightenment.

Much of the blame for this of course rests squarely on some of the usual suspects, the rent-seeking behaviour of modern capitalism chief among them. But blame should also lie at the feet of educational institutions, especially universities whose stated aims include the development of critical reasoning and the search for enlightenment. Their lack of presence in the digital public sphere is a striking feature of modern intellectual life. This is a serious oversight given what is at stake: overcoming the distortions of the digital public sphere, the misinformation, profiteering, commodification, as well as the widespread epistemic injustices and flagrant anti-democratic practices, depends, as Sevignani puts it (2022: 93) ‘on democratic learning processes in publics that foster the flourishing of communicative competences’. Of all the public institutions, universities are uniquely placed to help facilitate these ‘democratic learning spaces’ but have ceded this territory in the informal world of digital communication and opinion formation.

Why such a disconnect between the universities and the public? Given the make-up of the digital public sphere, there are technological and spatial elements at play in this disconnect as well as the commodifying issues mentioned above. While these issues are significant, this paper aims instead to examine a more fundamental concern which is the relation between the universities and the public. Specifically, the paper will explore the extent to which universities engage with the process of intellectualising the public, or public intellectualism. In order to do this, the paper will first of all: provide some historical context for this relation and detail how this relation has been impacted by social transformations; second, identify the mechanisms of public intellectualism (for example, evidential, communicative, pedagogical) and their institutional embeddedness, and third, critically examine the content of public intellectualism – for example, welfare and economic redistribution, justice, knowledge and power, the public good, democracy, voice and representation. The paper concludes by detailing some implications of this for the future of critical reasoning in the digital public sphere.