Why Distance Learning?

This is the first of a two-part conversation with Michael Barbour, one of the most cited researchers in K-12 distance and online learning. Michael is assistant dean for academic innovation and integration at Touro University California, and has spent nearly three decades studying the design, delivery, and support of K-12 distance, online, and blended learning — as well as the policy and governance structures that shape it. His work has brought him before legislatures and policymakers around the world.

In this episode, we put a foundational assumption on the table: that research gives teachers answers. Michael makes a clear and generous case that it doesn't — and that both researchers and classroom teachers share responsibility for that misunderstanding. The distinction he draws between best practices and promising practices isn't semantic. It has real consequences for how leaders build cultures of evidence-informed decision-making, and how teachers are trained to engage with research in the first place.

From there, the conversation moves into some of the most persistent misconceptions in the field — including the idea that distance learning only works for certain types of students, and the often-overlooked role that local support plays in whether any online program succeeds or fails. Michael also challenges the assumption that face-to-face teachers have a natural engagement advantage over their online counterparts, and makes a compelling case for why the distance environment may actually offer more tools for meaningful connection — not fewer.

"The best that we can hope for in all honesty is that research might lead us to a promising practice as a starting point." — Michael Barbour

Topics covered:
  • 00:00 — Michael's origin story in K-12 distance learning
  • ~04:00 — Why teachers don't engage with research, and why researchers share the blame
  • ~10:00 — Best practices vs. promising practices: why the distinction matters
  • ~17:00 — Who distance learning actually works for
  • ~21:00 — The role of local support in online program design
  • ~24:00 — Engagement, belonging, and the myth of the visual cue
  • ~30:00 — What "personalized learning" actually looks like in K-12 online contexts
Links and resources:

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.

**INTRO:**
Why Distance Learning is a podcast for education leaders and practitioners who are making real decisions about how virtual learning gets designed, adopted, and sustained. I'm Seth, and every episode we try to surface at least one assumption worth questioning. Today we're starting a two-part conversation with Michael Barbour — assistant dean for academic innovation at Touro University California and one of the most cited researchers in K-12 distance learning. The assumption we're putting on the table in this episode: that research gives teachers answers. Michael makes a compelling case that it doesn't — and that both researchers and teachers share the blame for that misunderstanding. That reframe matters, because if you're trying to build a culture of evidence-informed practice in your school or system, you need to know what research can and can't actually do for you. This is part one.

*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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**Seth:** Tammy, could you please introduce our guest?

**Tami:** I'd be happy to. Michael Barbour is an assistant dean for academic innovation and integration at Touro University California. He has been involved with K-12 distance, online, and blended learning for over three decades as a researcher, evaluator, teacher, course designer, and administrator. For almost three decades, his research has focused on the effective design, delivery, and support of K-12 distance, online, and blended learning, as well as how regulation, governance, and policy can impact the effectiveness. Michael's background and expertise has resulted in engagement with legislatures and policymakers all around the world.

**Seth:** Michael, welcome to the podcast. When I met you at DLAC, you were introduced to me as the person who is most cited in terms of research around distance learning. I have not fact-checked that, but I'm just going to assume that it's true for the case of this podcast. And I know that your Google Scholar page lists something like 10,000 citations. We are extremely excited to have this conversation. This is a strategic initiative of this podcast — to have more researchers on as a way to bridge the gap between research and practice. And typically we end the podcast with the title of the podcast, which is a question: why distance learning? I want to actually begin with that question this time, but in the context of your life. Three decades ago, you started researching this. Why distance learning? Why was that the direction you went?

**Michael:** I was fortunate that my first job in K-12 was actually out in a rural school. Two years before I got that first position, while I was still a student, the university that I was at received a federal grant to set up an online science and math academy for AP courses in that particular district. So I was sort of tangentially aware of it and following what they were doing as an undergrad. Then, after I got my degree and spent a year substituting, I got a job in this district as a social studies teacher. Being the competitive person I am by nature, I thought — there are these online science and math courses for AP kids, why can't there be social studies ones? So that first year, I basically set up an AP European history class online. We had five students at three different schools throughout the district, and it just grew from there. By the time I left four years later, we were teaching all six AP Social Studies courses. I had students enrolled from all around the world — fee-paying ones from outside of the province — which allowed us to fund the students within the province who were taking it.

**Seth:** That is — Allyson is already excited, I can see it.

**Allyson:** Yes! Bring in the history! It is so fun to talk to you, because two of us here on this podcast have definitely cited you before. It's exciting to hear about how your work started — that it came out of what you needed in the school, and seeing that growth experience. We look to bridge the opportunities of research and practice all the time, so having this conversation is something I think can bring so many insights for all of our listeners. I wonder — what do you see as the most persistent gap between your research and what you're finding is happening in the classroom today?

**Tami:** Same here — you said history teacher and I was like, yes, that's right, it's just as important as math and science.

**Michael:** Well, I don't think it's specific to distance learning or K-12 distance learning. I think most educational researchers face this. The access and interest that teachers have in educational research in general is a big issue. Actually, as part of the research agenda that we just released at DLAC, one of the things we did in the first phase was collect some data when we were surveying folks about exactly that — what educators thought of research, how they used it, where they went to find it. As part of the editorial we have coming out in the special issue, my colleague Jared Bork was leading most of that analysis.

**Seth:** Who will be on the podcast soon, by the way.

**Michael:** The reality is most classroom teachers — and online teachers are in the same boat — are more likely to listen to the teacher in the classroom next to them than they are to go out and look for research on anything. And regardless of how accessible we try to make what we're finding, it really is not going to have that kind of impact. Unfortunately, this isn't a post-pandemic thing. It's not a post-truth kind of world thing. It's always kind of been this way. All you've got to do is look at the number of teachers who still believe that learning styles have research behind them to know that teachers really don't care that much about research, but care very much about what they think they're seeing in front of them. And unfortunately, that's the biggest challenge that we have.

**Seth:** Poor Howard Gardner. I'm wondering — and I think you're right that teachers pay more attention to the person next to them than they do to academic research — why do you think that is? My guess might be around this idea that it's such a hard job that you end up kind of in the trenches with people, and there's a real bonding that happens with the people around you. But that also creates a natural out-group of anybody who isn't in that trench with you. So maybe there's a natural skepticism for anyone who hasn't been in your particular situation, with your particular administrator, your particular students and parents and coworkers. Is that why you think teachers might not have interest in this research, or do you think it's something else?

**Michael:** I think how you framed the end of that plays a big role in it. Whenever someone reads a piece of research, particularly if it doesn't align with their own personal experience, the first thing is, well, these aren't the same as my kids. This isn't the same as my community or my school. They don't have to work under the constraints of my district or with my principal. And that's really the root of it — a misunderstanding of what research, particularly social science research, is actually designed to do. Unfortunately, even though a great proportion of our teachers have advanced degrees, the number of them who actually understand research and what it's supposed to do and what its intentions are is incredibly low. That one course you get in a master's degree — the 601, Introduction to Educational Research — just doesn't do a service to the folks out there, because they're really looking for something more like hard science. They want: you've done this research, so now tell me what I need to do so that my students can have success. And social science research doesn't work that way. Unfortunately, educational researchers haven't done a good job of trying to dispel that myth, and in many cases have actually perpetuated it. All you've got to do is look at the number of media comparison studies out there. A media comparison study — for those who aren't familiar — is where you basically take a piece of technology, teach one class with that technology and another class the way you always did, and even if you try to randomize who's in those classes, which is very difficult in a K-12 environment, if the technology class does better, it's attributed to the technology. It's not because of any other variable. The amount of research published out there that falls into that trap is significant. In K-12 online learning, we have the same thing. I'm guilty of it myself. When I was a novice researcher during my master's and doctoral degrees, and even the first couple of years as an academic, the number of media comparison studies I published was shameful, to be perfectly honest with you. So it's not that I'm just blaming teachers — researchers and academics played just as big a part in it. It really is just this misunderstanding of what research is designed to do. This notion that best practices exist out there is a complete myth. The best that we can hope for in all honesty is that research might lead us to a promising practice as a starting point that we can use within our own context.

**Seth:** So if I'm understanding you correctly, the purpose of educational research is not to provide best practices, but to provide promising practices — much in the same way that any given professional development session gives teachers tools for their toolbox, but it's up to them whether or not to use that tool at any given time. Would you say that's essentially what educational research does?

**Michael:** That would be a very accurate characterization of what I said.

**Seth:** Yeah. It's interesting, because I feel like people — teachers in general — have accepted that reality with PD. It's a take-it-or-leave-it kind of situation where they can take the tool or not. But with educational research, maybe because of the way media covers findings as new discoveries that we are now certain of, there's a disconnect. You hear: this is the case. And because that's the starting place of the conversation, some people reject the information. Which makes your job pretty hard, I think.

**Michael:** It does. And it's not just the media. All you've got to do is look at the federal government and their What Works Clearinghouse as a good example. They talk about the experimental design or quasi-experimental design — the randomized control trial — as being the gold standard for educational research. And the reality is, even in the hard sciences, this isn't entirely the case. I work at primarily a medical and health science school now, and one of the things I've learned about medical research — which we hold as sort of the gold standard that all educational social science research should be moving toward — is the fact that treatments tend to have side effects. Treatments tend to have markers that let you know you're in the treatment group. So the idea that we've got this double-blind randomized control trial thing that comes out of the medical profession that we should all be striving for — it's not really that clean in the medical profession in the first place. Then holding that up as the gold standard and trying to emulate it in a social science context is just a flawed model from the beginning. Yet you can go to the What Works Clearinghouse and see dozens or hundreds of studies listed as the gold standard. If I'm an educated individual reading what's on the front page of that website, I would think: I'm going to find answers here. Not: I'm going to find clues here. And that's really what educational research has given you — clues to how you might address whatever problem you're working toward. It doesn't give you answers, but unfortunately, that's how it gets sold by so many people.

**Seth:** Yeah. That idea of clues — I'm thinking about a book I read that I did not intend to bring up today. It's called Sand Talk, and it's about indigenous wisdom from Australia. One of the things they talk about is this limitation of Western science — the attempt to isolate variables and determine causation in an extremely artificial setting, because all settings are actually quite dynamic. It creates a false understanding of what truth is. You can create conditions where something is true, but if those conditions don't exist in real life, then is it actually true? Social sciences have been dealing with this reality across all disciplines — essentially, this happens in these conditions, sometimes most of the time, almost all of the time. But it might be different for you, because you're a human and you yourself are a dynamic system inside an even more dynamic system. So I do like that idea of clues. These are ideas, things you can consider, because any given teacher is going to consider all sorts of things in any given day. So why not have more things that you might be able to consider as you're trying to solve these complex problems?

**Michael:** Yeah. When I have these conversations, I always think of something I came across during a sabbatical I did in New Zealand about a decade ago. They paint these little sayings on the back of camper vans. One that I took a picture of — because I use it in a lot of my presentations — is: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That's sort of the truth we're working with here.

**Allyson:** I'm taking so much in. I'm wondering about how the different ways that promising practices can be wrapped into practical resources when you're doing this type of research. And putting together everything I've read of yours in real time — I do wonder: is there anything that comes up often where it's a common assumption or misconception about hybrid distance learning or virtual schooling overall that your research challenges? And are there practical tools throughout that research that can be implemented right away — so that someone is reading something and then immediately able to put it into practice?

**Michael:** Yes. I could use a lot of examples here — I'll try to limit it to one or two. The first one that automatically comes to mind when you mention ideas that people have that might not be accurate based upon what the research suggests: for folks within the distance learning community, there's often a notion that by subject area, grade level, maturity level, or some other factor, certain types of online learning or certain mixes of synchronous versus asynchronous are more or less appropriate. For folks outside of the distance learning community, they step back even further and ask: can any student learn at a distance, or only certain students? One of the things we clearly see in the research — not just my own, but across the field, both at the K-12 and adult levels — is that distance learning can work for any student. Now, a particular distance program might not work for all students, because a well-designed distance program is going to target a specific population, in much the same way that if I come in and teach my class the way I think I teach best, some students are inevitably going to learn and some won't. I'll use myself as an example. I lecture a lot. It's history — I'm a storyteller. I think I'm good at direct instruction. I'm not good at organizing group work. I didn't like it as a student, and I don't like it as a teacher. And I can tell you that the majority of students will learn more from me when I lecture than when I try to set them up in group work, because I'm just better at it. So distance learning can work for any type of student, and the way you would organize it depends largely on the types of students you're trying to reach. When we look at the programs that have a great deal of success, they've modeled their delivery and support around targeting a specific population. The ones that aren't having a lot of success — and unfortunately, within the field, they tend to be the bigger ones we hear about in the media — are trying to be all things to all people. And any teacher out there knows that when you're trying to be all things to all people, you will be nothing to anyone. The other thing we've come to see in the literature is the role that local support plays in the distance environment. When most people think of distance education, they think of the person who designs the content or curriculum, and the person who delivers it. We often forget — particularly at the K-12 level — that there's a need for local support. Regardless of whether you're working with a mature 18-year-old or a five or six-year-old, something at the local context — be it the home or the school — needs to be able to provide support. And the online program needs to plan that in as part of the delivery model. If it's a supplemental program in a middle school where kids go to a distance learning lab to take one class, the online program needs to make sure the person in that room has some understanding of the programming those kids are going through and some training on how to support them, even though they're not the direct teacher. If it's a full-time environment and you've got an eight-year-old learning completely online, the online program needs to make sure the parent understands both what the student is doing and what their own role is — because their role isn't to be another teacher. If it was, this would just be a homeschool setting and we could save a lot of money by sending a thumb drive home with all the content and saying, teach this. That's not their role. So we need to make sure the online program teaches the parent or guardian what their responsibilities are and what their job is in that context. And I'll stop there, because I could literally fill an entire podcast with that question alone.

**Seth:** Yeah, and actually we've filled several episodes with that question — it was a theme of ours for a couple of years. You've challenged a couple of assumptions just with that answer. One of them being that online learning requires standardization in order to be successful. With both of those examples, you're arguing that local considerations — like any good teaching — are critical to creating success for any given program. And a thing we investigate a lot on this program is engagement. Because when you hear that distance learning isn't for everybody, one of the things that comes up immediately is this idea that for some kids, they're just not engaged by it. Issues of relationships and community are concerns in an online setting, where there's a belief that in-person is superior for relationship building, and that sometimes relationship building is even impossible online. I'm wondering what the research says about designing for belonging in virtual schools and that component of building community.

**Michael:** Well, I think the first thing we have to do is tackle one of the myths that often gets perpetuated when it comes to distance learning. That idea that simply because I'm a classroom teacher and I can look around the room and look into the eyes of the 35 kids — and that's usually a generous class size, because many teachers out there will say 35 kids, I wish — this notion that I can tell whether or not they're paying attention, and more so whether or not they're understanding me. And I think anyone being honest with themselves knows what a stretch that is. From the time these kids are five until the time they're 18, we spend basically 13 years teaching them how to do school. So any kid who just wants to not be bothered knows what to do to make it look like they're paying attention. I'm reminded of when I was an undergrad — I had a medieval British history class with this old British professor, really thick Cockney accent, wonderful class to be in. We'd walk in for this 10 o'clock class and he'd basically lecture the entire time. I would sit and close my eyes because I'm one of those people who gets distracted by everything around me — if someone's doodling, I want to see what they're doing. So I would try to block everything out and just listen. At the end of the semester, he required everyone to come in physically to get their final paper. When I went in and told him how much I enjoyed his class, he looked at me strangely and said: you slept through the entire class. This is 15 weeks where he thought I was sleeping through every single lecture, when I was completely engrossed with what he was saying and trying not to be distracted by anything but his voice. The nice thing about being in a distance environment is we have so many mediums available to us. In a synchronous session like this one, some folks will have their cameras on, some won't. Some will look like they're paying attention, some will look like they're shopping on Amazon. Some will engage in the discussion, some won't. Some will use those little reaction buttons and some won't. But beyond that, if that doesn't work, maybe it's reaching out individually with email. Maybe it's through a threaded discussion in your learning management system. There are so many ways you can set up individual journals within your LMS — just you and the student, asynchronous, a little bit anonymous. There are so many ways to engage students in these environments. And that's one of the strengths of distance learning. When you look at the research, we find it tends to be a little bit more effective on the engagement front because we have more tools available — not because the medium is inherently more engaging or better, but because the medium naturally gives us more to work with.

**Allyson:** I love that. What we're really talking about is that a good teacher is going to be a good teacher in whatever environment they find themselves in — the tools are just different. And like you said, the tools built into the distance learning medium — synchronous, asynchronous, and more immersive experiences coming in the future — allow for so much flexibility and personalization, not only for students but for educators thinking about how to critically and actively engage the learners they have. Flexibility and personalization are often touted as benefits of online learning. Does the research support that claim in a K-12 context? What enables or limits that potential?

**Michael:** From a research perspective, if you're looking at true personalization, the research doesn't support it, because I don't think we have any real K-12 online learning environments — or very few, none within the literature that I'm aware of — that actually provide a truly personalized environment. So when you see the branding — and I use that term very specifically — around personalized learning or individualized instruction within the K-12 online environment, what we're really talking about is a set number of standards that the state, or in some cases the district, has decided the student needs to learn in a particular content area. What these schools tend to do, because these standards — at least in the United States — are very discrete, designed so they can be tested through multiple choice tests, is have the student come in, take a multiple choice test, and say they get 70%. The system looks at what standards that 70% represents and, in these so-called personalized programs, provides them with content, instruction, and hopefully a teacher — though not always — to address the 30% they didn't know. Then they do another test, and once they reach 80% — which these programs consider mastery — they move on to the next bit of content. So there's 20% they may never learn. And that's sold as personalized learning. The problem with that is the content is the same. So if you scored 60% and Seth scored 50%, and 30% of what both of you didn't know was the same, you would get the exact same content. It's not personalized to you. It's not personalized to Seth. It is the exact same standardized content delivered back to you. And that's actually one of the reasons why we see these programs performing so poorly in the research — because the learner isn't actually being taken into account. It's interesting, because just recently I did a newsletter piece for the National Education Policy Center looking at the role of AI in personalized learning. And really, when it comes to some of these tools, the potential we have is quite extraordinary. You mentioned XR and VR. We're not that far away — from a technical standpoint — from being able to have a student walk up to a terminal, ask to learn about something, have the terminal ask them questions to figure out where they are, and then put on a set of goggles — or if you're a Star Trek fan, step into a holodeck where the entire room transforms into that environment. If you look at agentic AI programmed correctly, and at a lot of the virtual reality headsets out there now — there's a cost factor that makes a lot of this prohibitive, but from a technical standpoint, we're not that far away. And in that kind of environment, the role of the teacher actually changes significantly — and I think for the better. The teacher's role becomes more of an assessment one, and more of a planner of the overall program of activity. Students are going to have to learn something they may not be interested in at some point, but if we have the tools and the technology to focus in an interdisciplinary way — rather than single subjects for an hour at a time — and if we can focus on what students are passionate about upfront, adding things they may be less passionate about but need in their overall learning program becomes really easy for a skilled teacher to do. I know I'm describing an environment that any classroom teacher is thinking: yeah, we'll get to that in about 100 years. And realistically, they may be right, because there's a lot of inertia in classroom instruction. But at least from a technical standpoint, we're not that far away from being able to realize that vision.

**Seth:** And you mentioned a holodeck, so you are now Allyson's favorite person.

**Allyson:** Already was! Can't wait for the holograms.

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**OUTRO:**
That's part one of our conversation with Michael Barbour. Before you come back for part two, here's something worth sitting with: if research only gives us promising practices and not best practices, what does that mean for how you talk about evidence with your board, your staff, or your community? Part two picks up with something even more urgent — why most educators still aren't prepared for remote instruction, and why that's going to keep mattering long after COVID is in the rearview mirror. We'll see you there.