1. Promote safeguarding Remote learning creates new health and safety risks for children.
Online engagement by minors can lead to different forms of abuse. Some children and young people unable to attend school will be at a greater risk of harm at home. Governments have a fundamental responsibility to mitigate these risks and promote the importance of different forms of safeguarding.
2. Make teaching engagement with vulnerable and disadvantaged students the top priority
The evidence relating to distance learning identifies student motivation, engagement and self-regulation as the single biggest challenge facing the remote teacher. This challenge is exacerbated in several ways by disadvantage. Insights from this Evidence Review are consistent with the global consensus that policymakers must make learning continuity with disadvantaged and vulnerable students the top priority during the period of school closure. At a local level, teachers should use all available means to keep in touch with high-risk students and their families, providing pastoral support and guidance for learning.
3. Look for all available opportunities to promote ‘teaching presence’
Students will benefit from the highest possible level of interaction with teachers. Achieving teacher visibility will be particularly challenging in those countries where the primary means of remote instruction is through a centralised radio or TV channel. Those responsible for the design of the programmes should ensure that there is continuity in the face or voice of the central teacher. The broadcast teacher should demonstrate a caring persona, demonstrating warmth and an interest in student welfare and academic progress. Opportunities should be identified to create a sense of community. Conventional radio routinely promotes the idea of ‘the community of listeners’ by inviting individuals within the audience to submit questions via SMS. This humanises mass media broadcasting. In the context of centralised remote teaching through radio or TV, there may be scope for supplementary engagement by local teachers using SMS messaging or social media to establish ‘presence’ with students. If possible, teachers should contact their own students, checking that they are engaged with the broadcast resources. In the context of very large classes and high student-teacher ratios, teachers should always give priority to contacting the most vulnerable learners. Local teachers should also attempt to establish SMS or social media contact with parents, encouraging them to ensure that children engage with the broadcast material and providing regular tips on the focus of the children’s learning. Policymakers should manage centralised broadcasting adaptively, gathering data from localities about levels of use and engagement, and looking for practical ways to modify provision in order to increase engagement. Where online learning is possible at school level, teachers should promote ’presence’ through the design of both synchronous and asynchronous activities. Teachers should look for every possible opportunity to humanise and personalise pedagogical messaging. Synchronous teaching may be technically difficult but provides a potentially important context for teacher-student engagement. Formative assessment dialogue is both essential for learning and a way of transmitting the message that the teacher cares about the wellbeing and progress of the individual student. Video, used either synchronously or asynchronously, gives the teacher a powerful means of promoting their presence. A ‘virtual office hours’ approach should ideally be used so that individual students can proactively ask for guidance and feel that their personal academic or pastoral problems matter to the remote teacher.
4. Design broadcast and online teaching activities that encourage cognitive engagement and learning
Whether the medium is radio or TV broadcasting or online learning, teaching activities should be intended to maximise cognitive engagement and minimise the risk of passivity on the part of the learner. The remote teacher should provide frequent examples of ‘modelling’, personally demonstrating the skill that is being taught and inviting the student to understand the components of good work. The teacher should make visible to the students the thought processes and decisions made when producing the modelled work. There should be frequent low-stakes assessment activities which encourage students to retrieve and apply their knowledge related to the topic. The remote teacher should promote metacognitive strategies. Students should be frequently encouraged to evaluate their own work and to understand ‘what good looks like’ and how they can take responsibility for improving their own work.
5. Understand the challenges and limitations of self-paced and student-directed learning
It is, of course, important that students develop the ability to work independently. However, too much emphasis on self-paced learning can lead to disengagement. In a distance learning context, great care is needed in considering the required levels of self-regulation. The lesson from the world of MOOCS is that even adults find self-paced learning, with limited teacher interaction, problematic. Student project work requires particularly careful design. Students need opportunities to research and answer enquiry questions, but they also benefit from careful structure and regular access to inputs and guidance from an expert teacher.
6. Support teachers through the curation of learning resources
Remote teachers should be given as much help as possible in accessing existing, quality-assured curriculum materials. Teachers are likely to find OER particularly helpful because they have the potential to provide both high-quality resources and scope for modification to meet specific local circumstances.
7. Plan for school re-opening and beyond
Despite all best efforts, it is inevitable that some students’ learning will be harmed by the current phase of school closure. Policymakers should be planning now for ‘catch-up’ programmes when schools re-open. While the world awaits a vaccine for Covid-19, there remains the possibility that schools will be forced to close repeatedly and there is a need to plan for a more resilient remote teaching infrastructure that enables better maintained learning continuity during any future school closures. The current crisis also provides an opportunity for learning about the strengths and weaknesses of technology which can be used beyond the period of Covid-19 crisis.