Why Distance Learning?

In this episode of Why Distance Learning, your hosts continue their conversation with Jered Borup — professor at George Mason University and one of the most-cited researchers in K-12 online learning — about what AI in education is actually doing to relationships, what social presence requires when "build a video lecture" can be done by a chatbot, and why teacher burnout is the real bottleneck the field doesn't want to talk about. Borup connects his earliest 2012 work on asynchronous video to his 2025 Open Praxis research on combining AI-generated text with human-created video, and argues that AI used to offload feedback erodes the very thing online learners need: the felt sense that the teacher is real and knows them.

Together, the hosts and Jered explore the conflation of social media, video games, and ed tech in the parental imagination after the pandemic; how to use AI without replacing the relational core of teaching; why one-on-one asynchronous video may build social presence more reliably than synchronous Zoom classes; the DLAC Phase 2 research agenda Borup co-authored with Michael Barbour and Kristen DeBruler; the mental-health gap between teachers and other professionals with comparable education; and Borup's one-line answer to the show's title question — that personalization and Universal Design for Learning are easier to do online than off.

This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation. Listen to Part 1 for the foundational ACE framework, the on-site mentor model, and the parent question.

Key Topics
  • "Emergency remote learning" vs. real online learning — what parents are still confusing
  • Social presence — old research, new tools (asynchronous video, AI-plus-human-video)
  • The risk of offloading teacher feedback to AI
  • Asynchronous one-on-one video as a relationship lever (vs. one-to-many Zoom)
  • DLAC Research Agenda Phase 2 — what's keeping researchers up at night
  • Teacher mental health and the AI strain on top of pandemic strain
  • Authentic assessment and "we're too in love with the five-paragraph essay"
  • Empathy as the core design move
  • "Why distance learning?" — empowerment, personalization, UDL

Links & Resources

Guest Bio: Jered Borup
Jered Borup is a professor in the Division of Learning Technologies at George Mason University and co-coordinator of the Learning Technologies in Schools graduate program. His research, grounded in six years of junior-high history teaching, focuses on K-12 online and blended learning: the support communities that surround a learner, the parental role in online education, and how generative AI can extend personalized support to historically underserved students. He earned his Ph.D. in Instructional Psychology and Technology from Brigham Young University and has been recognized as one of the top 2% most-cited researchers in his field.

About the Hosts
Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of Why Distance Learning. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators — building the kind of structured, human-centered distance learning the podcast explores. See https://banyangloballearning.com/

Allyson Mitchell works with CILC, the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration, to help educators implement high-quality live virtual learning experiences across grade levels. Discover more at CILC.org.

Creators and Guests

Host
Allyson Mitchell
SF
Host
Seth Fleischauer
TM
Host
Tami Moehring

What is Why Distance Learning??

Why Distance Learning? is a podcast about the decisions, design choices, and assumptions that determine whether live virtual learning becomes shallow and transactional—or meaningful, relational, and effective at scale.

The show is designed for education leaders, instructional designers, and system-level practitioners responsible for adopting, scaling, and sustaining virtual, hybrid, and online learning models. Each episode examines the structural conditions under which distance learning actually works—and the predictable reasons it fails when it doesn’t.

Through conversations with researchers, experienced practitioners, and field-shaping leaders, Why Distance Learning? translates research, field evidence, and lived experience into decision-relevant insight. Episodes surface real tradeoffs, near-failures, and hard-won lessons, equipping listeners with clear framing and language they can use to explain, defend, or redesign distance learning models in real organizational contexts.

Hosted by Seth Fleischauer of Banyan Global Learning, and Allyson Mitchell and Tami Moehring of the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration, the podcast challenges outdated narratives about distance learning and explores what becomes possible when live virtual education is designed intentionally, human-centered, and grounded in evidence.

**Episode 82 ** Why Distance Learning — Jered Borup, Part 2 of 2

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**[INTRO — recorded separately]** [00:00:00]

*Hello, and welcome back to Why Distance Learning, the podcast for education leaders and practitioners who are making real decisions about how virtual learning gets designed, adopted, and sustained. I'm Seth Fleischauer, founder and president of Banyan Global Learning, and my cohosts are Allyson Mitchell and Tami Moerhing of the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration. Every episode we try to surface at least one assumption worth questioning.*

*This is Part 2 of our conversation with Jered Borup, professor at George Mason and co-creator of the Academic Communities of Engagement framework. In Part 1, we covered the framework, the on-site mentor model, and the parent question. You can pick this episode up cold — but Part 1 is a clean primer on the structure underneath the rest of his research.*

*The assumption on the table today: that AI in online learning is mostly a productivity question — what teachers can offload to it, how much faster grading can get. Jered's work suggests it's a relationships question first. The parts of teaching students actually remember are the parts most at risk when we hand them to AI. Used deliberately, the same tools can extend personalized support to learners who've never had it.*

*This episode is brought to you by CILC, the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration, connecting students to real experts through live virtual field trips and experiences — visit cilc.org to learn more. And by Banyan Global Learning, which brings K-12 classrooms face to face with global peers and expert facilitators through live, thematic international exchange programs — find them at banyangloballearning.com.*

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**Jered** [01:30] *(approx)*
And I do think that parents have their experience during the pandemic, which is awful. I get shortness of breath and my chest tightens up when I think about it too. Like, it was a real awful time.

**Allyson** [01:36] *(approx)*
Yes, I understand.

**Jered** [01:55] *(approx)*
So they're coming with these ideas of "that's what online learning is." And that was emergency remote learning. That was not online learning. And so helping them to really understand that this is different can be helpful. And it's not a threat. It's not a punishment in that way. But it can be really an aid. There's an interesting movement right now with parents

**Allyson** [01:59] *(approx)*
Right.

**Jered** [02:25] *(approx)*
wanting to remove technology from the classroom even. So I know we're talking about online learning where you have to have technology, but even in person, like blended environments. And I think right now the default for teachers — before the pandemic, the default was no, no tech. And since the pandemic, the default is tech. And so like, "you need to read an article, let's do that on the laptop, you know," that type of thing. And I think that in general, as educators, we need to swing that back a little bit more and figure out a balanced approach to using technology. At the same time, some people are saying, "no, let's remove all technology from the classroom." And having taught when there was no technology in the classroom, I will tell you that is not a great situation either. And so I think helping parents understand how technology can benefit their learners when all they see is a negative — kind of

**Allyson** [03:09] *(approx)*
Yeah.

**Jered** [03:22] *(approx)*
these addictive-designed apps and things like that. And so I think their reaction is understandable, but I don't think it's totally informed of what the benefits can be with technology. So I think that as an educational community, we have a lot of work to do in that. And that's really a lot of that's on us too.

**Allyson** [03:45] *(approx)*
Hmm, beautifully put.

**Seth** [03:45] *(approx)*
I think that is the PR opportunity du jour. And I think that a lot of what's happening with parents is that they're conflating social media with AI, with ed tech. And there's a lot of in video, right? And there's a lot of overlap between those two — like, obviously they all involve a screen. They have varying degrees of

**Allyson** [03:49] *(approx)*
Hmm.

**Allyson** [04:00] *(approx)*
and video games.

**Jered** [04:02] *(approx)*
Mm-hmm.

**Seth** [04:14] *(approx)*
learning that can happen. They have varying degrees of addiction that can happen. Let's stick on this topic of trends for a bit, because you've done a little bit of work in this realm. And going back to your earliest research in 2012, it was on asynchronous video as a way to build what researchers called *social presence* — the felt sense that the instructor and classmates are real people in the room, in an online learning setting, not just text on a screen. The finding is that without it, online students engage less, persist less, and learn less deeply. And then in 2025, your *Open Praxis* paper returns to the same problem, but with new tools — combining AI-generated text with human-created video. And the recurring assumption here is about online learning and that it can't scale without losing the relationships that make it work. I'm wondering — does the AI-plus-video combination actually change that math, or is social presence still the same problem in a new shape?

**Jered** [05:30] *(approx)*
I think it's even more important now to have social presence. If you talk to a student and say, "what's your favorite class?" and they say "science," you say, "why?" they're not going to say, "the textbook is amazing." That's not what motivates kids. They're going to talk about the teacher. They're going to say, "the teacher's so funny," and "she always has talk about the dog and the jokes that the teacher tells and the experiments that

**Allyson** [05:42] *(approx)*
Yeah.

**Allyson** [05:54] *(approx)*
You

**Jered** [05:59] *(approx)*
the teacher designs," and things like that. The temptation now — or the feedback that the teachers provide and all that stuff — so now the temptation is, as an online teacher, to say, "man, I gotta grade all these papers. Now what am I gonna do?" And so just feed that and offload that into AI. Which I think is really dangerous, because giving feedback, mentoring — those are things that

**Allyson** [06:15] *(approx)*
You

**Jered** [06:28] *(approx)*
students want to receive from the teacher. And just like teachers are complaining that, "oh, like, all I'm getting are these AI-generated essays" and things like that — and that's a whole other topic — students don't want those messages generated by AI either. They don't want the feedback on their work generated by AI. And so they have to be convinced that the teacher cares about them and that knows them and is real.

And that's harder to do online. It has to be more intentional. So some of the work that we do with asynchronous video is just easier to establish that in video when students can see the teacher. So that could be a one-to-many announcement: "Hey, welcome to the class. Really excited. I noticed what you did last week," that type of thing. But it can also be one-on-one messages and feedback. For instance, it can say, "hey" — not for every project, that would be way too much work, but at least sometime in the semester saying, "hey, great job on that assignment. I loved what you did. Let me pull it up on the screen and walk you through how you can make it even better." That type of thing takes time, but it can also take less time, depending on what type of feedback you're providing. That can be really important.

And also, learners getting to know each other can be really important too. So having them express themselves in multiple ways is valuable. Some are not going to like to type very much, and some, that's all they want to do. And so getting them to communicate and express themselves in multiple means can be really valuable.

And then when you're getting into AI, I use AI every day. I don't know about you guys, but I cannot get through a day without using AI. But it kind of reminds me of when new technologies come out — we think that it can do everything, and then we learn that it doesn't. So go back and watch early commercials for a microwave, and they're going to say, "oh, you can cook everything in this microwave. Thanksgiving coming up — cook the turkey in the microwave, no problem." And I feel like we're kind of in that stage right now with AI. Like, "oh, you got a problem? Do it with AI. It'll solve all your... you don't want to do something? AI will do it for you." And that

**Seth** [08:35] *(approx)*
Meh.

**Seth** [08:41] *(approx)*
[laughs]

**Allyson** [08:41] *(approx)*
Yeah.

**Jered** [08:56] *(approx)*
is not going to work. And it's really going to harm relationships if that's what we're doing. So I think we have to be intentional about who we are as human beings in a learning environment that is social. All learning is social. And so we need to really be intentional on when we use AI and then when it's best not to — even if it's something we don't like to do. Sometimes we just have — it's our job, we just have to do it. And we can't offload that human relationship-building to AI.

**Seth** [09:32] *(approx)*
Clarifying question — I'm not sure if you've looked into this or not, but did you find that asynchronous video is sufficient for establishing social presence? And how does it compare to the live connection when it comes to assessing social presence? Is there a line that you cross, and then you're good — and the live stuff provides other things, but it's not necessarily that sense of social presence? Or is there a spectrum where more live contact breeds more sense of social presence?

**Allyson** [10:15] *(approx)*
Yeah, that comes up all the time too — the idea that there's a lot of asynchronous, like, where can the synchronous fit in? So yeah, what an awesome question.

**Jered** [10:24] *(approx)*
Well, I love this conversation. There's three of us, you know, and a lot of back and forth, a lot of engagement. We're all participating. That typically is not what happens in a Zoom class, right? In a Zoom class, you've got 30, 40 students, one teacher, and it's hard to have those one-on-one conversations or small-group conversations with them. And I think that's where a lot of the relationship-building happens.

**Allyson** [10:28] *(approx)*
Yeah.

**Jered** [10:54] *(approx)*
And so I think that's easier to do asynchronously, actually. It's very, very different, and it's not going to replace in person or anything like that. But just having that one-on-one — even though it's asynchronous — can mean everything for students, and for teachers too. I mean, teachers want to have relationships too. Oftentimes, if they don't have those relationships, they can become really unmotivated and disconnected from their profession and have burnout and things like that. They are fueled by relationships with learners. And so having that back and forth, even if it's one-on-one video or text, can be really helpful. So not all communication needs to be a video. I tend to front-load that a lot. And so it's like they see me, they get to know me, and then when I need to reach out about something else, it's just easier to do that, because they know I'm real. I have my social presence.

One thing that we found with teachers is just calling can make a big difference. Just old technology — pick up the phone, call the parents, see how things are going with the learner. That can make a big difference too. So not everything has to be video. But it's just a matter of understanding when it could be really helpful for the learner to do a video recording or do text message or things like that.

**Allyson** [12:27] *(approx)*
More of the skills that they have to practice as they move forward in the digital world. And I wonder, though, two different things. Because we've been talking about a lot of the research that you've done — and all of the wonderful ACE framework. So I wonder if there is any question or anything that we haven't talked about that you want to bring up in that framework that we've been missing in our conversation. But also, because

**Jered** [12:30] *(approx)*
Yeah.

**Allyson** [12:56] *(approx)*
you and Michael Barbour and Kristen DeBruler — sorry if I'm not pronouncing correctly, sometimes my Philadelphia accent gets the best of me with the Ls and Rs — but you put out the DLAC research agenda phase two last September. So I wonder, of all of the questions that were included in that, is there one that keeps you up at night? Whether it's connected to the framework we've been discussing or something totally new that you are going to be diving into.

**Jered** [13:26] *(approx)*
Yeah, the thing that's keeping me up at night right now is grading. It's the end of semester. But the thing that I'm really concerned about is AI. And I know that that's probably predictable, but that and kind of reactions to AI. So I'll say that when Sam Altman released AI,

**Allyson** [13:30] *(approx)*
Yeah!

**Allyson** [13:49] *(approx)*
Hmm.

**Jered** [13:56] *(approx)*
it was not educational technology. I don't think Sam Altman was communicating a lot with teachers, like, "what do you need from me?" That really wasn't the conversation. And I think coming off of the pandemic, which was awful, and then straight into the age of AI, has put a lot of strain on teachers. I received an email from one of my former students who's a teacher that said —

**Allyson** [14:04] *(approx)*
What's the pedagogy that we should —

**Jered** [14:25] *(approx)*
it's just heartbreaking, because I keep getting these AI-generated essays from students. And anyone who's graded a paper knows how hard that is — to read a paper, then to know that they didn't even write it. You're spending more time giving them feedback than they did actually producing it. So I think that a lot has to change in how we design — how we assess learning. We're probably too in love with the five-paragraph essay. There's other ways of assessing knowledge, but that takes a lot of work. And so we're putting more strain on teachers that are already strained to the max. And you look at mental health of teachers and compare that to the mental wellness of other professions with similar education attainment and things like that — on all those metrics, teachers are struggling. And so I think that they need a lot of support. And we can't just keep adding one more thing onto teachers' plates, because eventually that plate is going to break. And I'm from a family of educators. I mentioned my mom was a teacher. My grandmother was a teacher.

**Seth** [15:47] *(approx)*
Hmm. Me too, both.

**Jered** [15:49] *(approx)*
Yeah, yeah. So I love teachers, and so it really is heartbreaking when I see that they're struggling in these areas and they're not receiving enough support to really be successful. And there's no excuse for it, really. And I think we see teachers leaving in droves, and I'm really concerned about the teacher shortage too. And so I think if anything's keeping me up at night, it's that. Like, how can we make teachers' lives better using technology and not making it one more thing that they have to figure out and deal with? Make it a tool that really benefits them, makes their jobs a little bit easier instead of more complicated.

**Seth** [16:38] *(approx)*
So challenge — you have 90 seconds, in this hypothetical situation, with an online educator, online school leader, and you want to surface one critical thing about your research that they should put into practice, but you only have this short amount of time with them. What do you highlight?

**Allyson** [16:40] *(approx)*
[laughs]

**Jered** [16:42] *(approx)*
Yeah.

**Jered** [17:02] *(approx)*
Man, I don't know. That's not even a cup of coffee. This is a true elevator speech. Yeah, I think that one thing I'd emphasize is building understanding and empathizing with others. Empathizing with parents. What are they really dealing with? What are they struggling with? And then try to figure out how to

**Allyson** [17:08] *(approx)*
[laughs]

**Jered** [17:31] *(approx)*
make it a little bit easier for parents and for teachers and for students. I think that we need a whole lot more empathy in education right now.

**Seth** [17:41] *(approx)*
First step of design thinking. And so the name of the podcast is "Why Distance Learning?" Jered Borup, you do a lot of research in this field and have for a very long time. What has emerged for you as the answer to that question? Why distance learning?

**Jered** [17:44] *(approx)*
Yeah, that's right.

**Jered** [18:03] *(approx)*
I think it really depends on the learner, right? I mean, there's so many reasons why people enroll in distance learning or online learning. But if I were to pick one thing that I think really benefits learners — is we can empower students with distance learning. We can allow them to personalize their learning better with distance learning. I remember when I was teaching in person, I had administrator Matt Cox — Mr. Bowtie, he always had a bowtie on — came into my room, and he's like, "you know what you should do? You should give your learners options in how they demonstrate their learning." And I'm like, "are you crazy? I just spent all night developing this one assessment. How can I do that for multiple pathways? I can't do that. That's impossible."

**Allyson** [18:36] *(approx)*
[laughs]

**Seth** [18:37] *(approx)*
[laughs]

**Jered** [18:58] *(approx)*
The more I've gotten into distance learning — that is possible. I mean, using it... talking about AI, AI has made it even easier. But looking at, like, Universal Design for Learning or personalized learning, it's better online than offline. And so I think for me, that's a big piece of the puzzle of why we need distance learning.

**Seth** [19:23] *(approx)*
Awesome. Allyson, any last thoughts or questions?

**Allyson** [19:26] *(approx)*
No, just I'm so grateful to learn from you through all of your research, but this conversation was so enlightening, and it's just great to have the opportunity to hear all of the great information you've collected through your career. And I just appreciate you stopping by and having the conversation.

**Jered** [19:43] *(approx)*
Yeah, it's been great. Thanks for having me.

**Seth** [19:44] *(approx)*
Is there anywhere you'd like to point our listeners to find your work online?

**Jered** [19:48] *(approx)*
No, I'm not online very much. I got rid of all my socials pretty much. But I will say, I'm the only Jered Borup in the country with that name. So Google me. You'll find my email address. If you want to send me an email, that's probably the best way to connect with me.

**Allyson** [19:50] *(approx)*
[laughs]

**Seth** [20:07] *(approx)*
Awesome. Well, thank you.

**Allyson** [20:07] *(approx)*
And we can send links to all of the wonderful information that you have out there too. So we'll have them in the show notes.

**Jered** [20:12] *(approx)*
Great, yeah. Thank you.

**Seth** [20:15] *(approx)*
Thank you so much for being here.

**Jered** [20:16] *(approx)*
Thank you.

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**[OUTRO — recorded separately]**

*That's a wrap on our two-part conversation with Jered Borup. AI in online learning isn't a productivity problem first — it's a relationships problem. The parts of teaching students actually remember — the dog jokes, the feedback that recognized them — are the parts most at risk when we offload to AI; used deliberately, the same tools can extend personalized support to learners who've never had it. And when Jered was asked what one thing he'd put in front of an online school leader, the answer wasn't a framework — it was empathy: for parents, for teachers, for students. Links to Jered's social-presence and AI work, plus the DLAC research agenda he co-authored, are in the show notes. Thanks for listening to Why Distance Learning, and we'll see you next time.*