Why Distance Learning?

This is the second 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. If you haven't listened to part one yet, start there.

In this episode, we examine an assumption that surfaced repeatedly during the pandemic: that because distance learning has been around for decades, schools should have been ready. Michael has the data on why they weren't — and why, despite a global wake-up call, most still aren't. The numbers are striking: less than 10% of teacher preparation programs included any meaningful content on K-12 online learning even after COVID. And as Michael makes clear, the next disruption — whether pandemic, weather event, or political unrest — is not a question of if, but when.

From there, the conversation takes a surprising turn. Michael shares a counterintuitive research finding: students who had K-12 online learning experience actually performed worse as online learners at the university level — and he unpacks exactly why that happened and what it reveals about the difference between synchronous and asynchronous program design. He also walks through one of the most compelling real-world models of synchronous distance learning in K-12 — the Center for Distance Learning and Innovation in Newfoundland — and what it would actually take to replicate that kind of intentional design at scale.

"Every single one of your listeners, unless they plan on retiring in the next year or two, will likely experience another regional or global pandemic. And that's just on the pandemic side." — Michael Barbour

Topics covered:
  • ~1:30 — Bridging policy, pedagogy, and technology: why hopes and prayers aren't a strategy
  • ~3:20 — What the National Education Technology Plans have been saying since 1996
  • ~4:20 — The teacher preparation gap: the numbers before, during, and after COVID
  • ~7:20 — The history of pandemics and why every educator needs distance learning skills
  • ~13:20 — A counterintuitive finding: why K-12 online experience made university online learners worse
  • ~19:20 — Synchronous vs. asynchronous design and the CDLI model
  • ~28:20 — Why distance learning matters for every educator, not just virtual school teachers
Links and resources:
  1. Discover more virtual learning opportunities at CILC.org with hosts Tami Moehring and Allyson Mitchell.
  2. Seth Fleischauer's Banyan Global Learning combines live virtual field trips with international student collaborations for a unique K12 global learning experience. See https://www.banyangloballearning.com/

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.

**Why Distance Learning | Episode 78: The Next Shutdown Is Coming. Are You Ready? with Michael Barbour (Part 2 of 2)**

**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 this is part two of our conversation with Michael Barbour — so if you haven't listened to part one yet, start there. The assumption we're examining in this episode is one that surfaced a lot during the pandemic: that because distance learning has been around for decades, schools should have been ready. Michael has the receipts on why they weren't — and more importantly, why most still aren't. If you're a leader thinking about institutional readiness for disruption, or a designer trying to figure out how synchronous and asynchronous learning should actually fit together, this one is for you.

*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:** There's a gap between technology and reality, and also policy and pedagogy. As a researcher, how do you think about bridging all of these things together?

**Michael:** I'm going to answer this honestly. In all honesty, the same way that most politicians want to solve the gun problem in the United States — with hopes and prayers. Because the reality is, when I look at K-12 online learning, I'll use a very solid example that most of us are quite aware of. If you go back to the National Education Technology Plans starting in 1996, there have been lines in every single one that has been released — up until the most recent one, which came post-pandemic — stating that both schools and teacher preparation programs need to ensure that teachers are ready to teach in a remote setting. When you get to the 2010 version, the 2014 version, the 2017 version, they specifically talk about pandemic-induced closures. I'm talking about something that was first mentioned back in 1996. So when 2020 comes along, and you've got all of these schools — this is the thing I find most scary about all of this — in research done immediately following the pandemic, they found that almost 40% of schools claimed to have a pandemic plan for remote instruction. Do we think that four out of every ten schools in the United States handled the pandemic and the remote learning that followed in a well-planned, pedagogically sound fashion? I think every single one of your listeners knows the answer to that. And it's not just schools. Teacher preparation programs since 1996 haven't done anything with this. If you look at the research, a study by Leanna Archambault and Catherine Kennedy back in 2011 found that literally 1.8% of teacher preparation programs had any real content around K-12 online learning. Leanna led a team that included Catherine and four or five others in 2016 that found that number had gone up to just over 3%. We replicated the study in Canada just before the pandemic, and I'm proud to say in Canada we were up to almost 30% — but that's still less than one out of every three programs. And unfortunately, it tended to be the small rural provinces that had it. So the vast majority of folks coming through programs like the University of Toronto, McGill, and UBC wouldn't have had it. Funnily enough, one of Leanna's doctoral students replicated the study again post-pandemic and it was still less than 10%. You would think after the pandemic — and most people say, well, yes, we had a global pandemic and it's not going to happen again. I don't want to shock your listeners, but I work at a primary medical and health science school, and during the pandemic we had these bi-weekly briefings made available to the community from folks across our different disciplines. I remember the second or third one, where the chair of our public health program had a slide up that I've continued to use in my own work — it looked at the history of pandemics. In the first millennium, we tended to have a global or at least regional pandemic every two to three hundred years. In most of the second millennium, they tended to be one, sometimes two a century. In the 1800s and 1900s, they tended to be two or three a century. When COVID hit in 2020, we were a fifth of the way through this century — and it was also the fifth global pandemic we had experienced since the year 2000. That means every single one of your listeners, unless they plan on retiring in the next year or two, will likely experience another regional or global pandemic. And that's just on the pandemic side. Look at the war in Ukraine, where kids haven't gone to school in years. Look at schools throughout most of Eastern Canada that have been closed for four and five days over the past few weeks because of snow. Look at kids in Hawaii who just went through a major storm. Regardless of whether it's natural disaster, climate-induced disruption, or political unrest — and when we think political unrest, we tend to think third world, we think somewhere else. But when you look at all of those ICE activities that were happening in Minneapolis in the past couple of months, and you see the number of families that have switched over to virtual and cyber schools because of the activities of the US government — the number would amaze you. This is a reality for every teacher. They're going to need to know how to design remote instruction, how to deliver it, and how to support it. Because the vast majority of folks out there are going to have to do this at some point in their career. It might not be something as big as COVID where the entire world shuts down, but most of them are going to face it.

**Allyson:** Right. And even in smaller situations — after the digital pivot of 2020, I had parents at my daughter's school asking me about distance learning, digital learning, the hybrid experience. And that was just because their child had broken their leg in four places and it was hard for them to get in and out of the school. Those are the small things where we can see the power of this medium. Because even if you're doing professional development, I wonder about the data related to virtual professional development versus in-person — how does that translate into practice? There was a lot of time, especially early on, where it felt like people thought they needed to create something new instead of looking to the research and the models that were already there. Good intentions all around — it was a difficult time. But the idea that you have to build it from scratch when there's over 20 to 30 years of research available is something you just don't want to see happen again. Especially now, when more schools are outfitted with the ability to turn on a camera. So how do we create those hybrid or online environments that feel comfortable and familiar? How do we ensure our students have the skill set and the confidence to connect, learn, and share their perspectives?

**Michael:** You say 20 to 30 years worth of research — that's actually one of the things that always annoys me about my colleagues on the research side when they start talking about what we know about K-12 distance, online, and blended learning and peg it sometime in the 90s as the starting point. If you look at any dissertation around virtual schooling or cyber schooling, the literature review starts in the mid-90s, at least when it comes to this body of research. Even though we've been doing correspondence distance education at the K-12 level — usually starting around 1900, depending upon the jurisdiction — and then we've got instructional radio, which still is in use extensively in certain countries. Australia, which is a well-developed industrialized nation, still has half a dozen schools of the air operating to this day. Instructional television, telematics, audio graphics — the idea that none of those mediums or delivery models have any lessons for us when it comes to how we provide online learning is just not accurate. That's the reality of the situation.

**Allyson:** Yes, 1732 even.

**Michael:** One of the experiences I've had that has stuck with me more than anything else — I shouldn't say stories, one of the experiences — I was interviewing a group of students for a study that a district wanted me to work on for them. They were looking at students who had moved to remote learning during the pandemic, who had previously never had any online learning experience, and who had stayed in the online environment afterwards — particularly those who stayed in a full-time environment. About two thirds of my sample were folks who had stayed full-time, and only a third were doing supplemental but taking multiple courses. There was one full-time student I interviewed — an African-American girl, 16 years old. The rationale she gave me both shocked me and saddened me. She was fortunate in that she had what she called a white-sounding name. And in the particular program she was in, it was primarily asynchronous, and when they did have synchronous sessions, they didn't require you to turn on the camera. She talked to me about how that was the first time in her life she felt she was actually treated like everyone else in her class. She was in a rural area where she was very much in the minority in terms of skin color. And for her entire educational career, up until the age of 16, she felt like she was treated differently because she was Black. Because she could obscure that fact in the online environment, it was the first time she felt she was getting the same experience and the same opportunity as everyone else in the classroom. I've done probably well over a thousand interviews with students over the past 30 years, and 95% of them I wouldn't be able to tell you what we talked about. But this one is something I'll never forget.

**Seth:** Yeah. It's an unexpected finding — you wouldn't want to think that the medium has that particular benefit, but it does. I'm wondering if we can build on that. Are there other surprising, counterintuitive findings you've come across in your research over the years?

**Michael:** One that has always shocked me — and I've never had the chance to go back to it, though I'd love to. It wasn't my study; I was brought in because they wanted someone with a K-12 online learning background. A couple of my colleagues back at Memorial University of Newfoundland had done a study where they were looking at students who had enrolled in online courses at the university, and they were looking for differences in student experiences and performance based on whether those students had a distance learning experience at the high school level. The question — and it's an easy one to misanswer — was: does having experience with online learning in the K-12 setting translate into being a better online learner when you get to university? I framed the question that way because in this particular study, it was only about 132 students. The answer was no. The students who had an online experience were actually worse. The students who had experience with distance education in their high school through the provincial virtual school tended not only to perform worse, but also had significantly less in terms of independent learning skills that we would hope a distance learner would have or develop. We speculated in the article that it was largely due to the particular type of program they had in high school. The program in Newfoundland — the Center for Distance Learning and Innovation — is primarily a synchronous program. Depending on the course, anywhere from 50 to 80% of the course is delivered synchronously. And what tends to happen during the asynchronous time isn't really asynchronous learning — they try to cram all of the content into that synchronous time and then do what we would charitably call seat work or homework during the asynchronous portion. When you get to the university environment, it's completely asynchronous, and you don't have an instructor calling the home school when you're not submitting things. Whereas in the K-12 setting, because we have truancy laws — and K-12 teachers are just better teachers than most university teachers in many cases, for a variety of reasons — when a student doesn't log in for a week, the first call is to the local school to find out if the student has been there. The next call is to the parent. So that was our speculation as to why we had that finding. But I would like to redo the study in really any other virtual school, because the CDLI in Newfoundland — with the exception of online programs in New Zealand and a couple in Australia — is more synchronous than the vast majority of online programs out there. Those K-12 programs that more closely resemble a program in higher ed, I'd like to see what the findings are in that context. But I always thought that was striking — that learning online in high school makes you a worse online learner when you get to university.

**Seth:** In some contexts.

**Allyson:** I also wonder if that's a cross-subject thing in some cases too. You said something really interesting about the asynchronous versus synchronous piece, and this occupies my mind all the time. The virtual school model being so connected to the asynchronous experience — do you have any research in those two areas? Have you seen any models where it's a really compelling combination — a comprehensive digital experience where you have consistent asynchronous and synchronous components, with real-time engagement? Have you seen a model like that? Is that a framework that your research suggests is still really needed?

**Michael:** Well, the answer to the first question is yes, I have looked at a fair amount. One of the biggest difficulties that virtual schools and K-12 online learning programs face is the reality that in many cases they're working across multiple districts, and many supplemental programs aren't necessarily legal entities within the educational context. Because of that, they can't mandate things. In most jurisdictions, a supplemental program — one where a student is enrolled in one or two courses and doing the rest of their schooling in a brick and mortar school — those virtual schools aren't schools. They're actually programs. They don't get funded as schools. They are partners — you might even think of them as an external vendor, although they would be offended by that term. They are a vendor that the school is essentially purchasing services from — purchasing a seat for a student in a class delivered in a particular way. The virtual school then can't come around and say, on Monday I need them in front of a computer from two to three, because they're not a legal structure in that way. So because of that, the vast majority of programs out there are set up as asynchronous programs. It's just the logistical reality. While there are ways to get around it, it would require a different mindset. The ability to have synchronous classes outside of the eight to four model — these programs don't do that unless it's individualized or optional, like office hours. But you can't say that every night at 6pm to 6:45 on Monday and Wednesday we're going to be online. The mindset of K-12 learning doesn't think like that. The program I mentioned — the Center for Distance Learning and Innovation in Newfoundland — because it's a province-wide virtual school and the primary audience it works with are roughly two-thirds of the schools in the province designated as rural, they are able to impose things. Newfoundland works on a five by fourteen timetable — five one-hour classes each day over a fourteen-day period that just rotates around. It allows a kid to do essentially seven different subjects over the course of the year. The CDLI publishes its timetable, and most of the rural school principals have gotten smart enough over the years that they don't do their own schedule until they get the CDLI schedule. They'll look to see when they have kids who need to take a particular CDLI course, and then build their own timetable around those same start and end times. That's actually one of the reasons they're able to have such a highly synchronous model — because they've got the ability to impose the schedule on the schools. Where they struggle the most is with the urban areas in the province. When schools from those urban areas participate, their schedule often doesn't align. You might have 15 minutes of your in-person math class left, but you've got to get up and walk out of the room and go to the distance ed lab because your online chemistry class is starting, because the schedules don't match up. But the school has to agree to that. The math teacher sitting in the room has to agree to let the person go with 15 minutes left in the class. The one thing the CDLI doesn't do as well is think carefully about what should be taught synchronously and what should be taught asynchronously. They'll tell you that roughly 60% of your time is allocated to synchronous instruction. What tends to happen is teachers try to do 100% of the content in that 60% of the time. What a good teacher would do is look at a unit — say there are seven lessons — and identify the three that students tend to get easily, letting them do those asynchronously, while focusing synchronous time on the four that tend to be more difficult. That's a model that could be used much more deliberately. The difficulty again is scope. If you've got an online program across multiple districts with urban areas, you really can't control the timetable. But if you have two or three rural districts that agree on it — because they have a smaller number of schools and don't have to fight each other for buses, which is actually why urban schools all have different start times — that kind of model could be quite useful. And that doesn't even count the policy and regulatory aspects that go along with it.

**Seth:** Yeah, it's a dynamic system. Well Michael, this is nearing the end of part two of this conversation. I feel like we should have you back for parts three and four sometime soon. But the question that I opened this conversation with was: why distance learning for you? I'd like to ask you now — why distance learning for other people? Why is this an important option?

**Allyson:** Mmm.

**Michael:** Well, I think it goes back to something I was talking about a few minutes ago — that unless you plan on retiring in the next year or two, you are going to be impacted by this in some way or form. Even if you are retiring in the next year or two, there's a good chance that students at your school right now are taking one or more classes online. Having an awareness of what it is they're doing, how their program is being delivered, and more importantly, how at the local level you can support that student — even if you aren't the teacher of record for them — these are all skills that would be useful for our educators to have. Plus you get the situation where some natural disaster runs through town and we've got to close schools for the next three weeks — and you're prepared for that kind of environment. I always think about 2020, when we point to the pandemic as closing schools and shutting the world down. My own home province of Newfoundland and Labrador, on January 25th or 26th of that year, had what they called Snowmageddon — where over a two or three day period, something like 80 inches of snow was dropped on the capital city. St. John's is a city whose downtown was largely built in the 1800s. Imagine dropping five or six feet of snow into the historic part of any major metropolitan area on the East Coast and trying to figure out how you're going to clear it. The schools in St. John's were closed for two full weeks while they were trying to dig out. And then literally five weeks later, the world shut down. My niece was actually a high school student at the time. She was in a semesterized school, so her second semester began the second week of January. She had three weeks of in-person learning the entire semester, even though she started right after Christmas — because of the weather disaster, and then the pandemic. And even though it was a province that has had three or four decades of experience with distance learning — using telematics since the 80s, and an online program since 1999 — it wasn't used. My niece never got access to a single CDLI course during either Snowmageddon or the entire pandemic, even though we had the entire content for every single high school course developed completely online and ready to deliver to every single student. It didn't happen. But every single teacher needs to be able to both develop content and — because most jurisdictions now do have content available — deliver and support it.

**Seth:** Well, Michael, thank you so much. You are a fountain of information, some strong and well-informed opinions, and a real resource for this community. We hope that our listeners got as much out of this conversation as we did. Thank you so much for being here.

**Michael:** It was a pleasure being here.

**Allyson:** Thank you.

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**OUTRO:**
That's a wrap on our two-part conversation with Michael Barbour. Here's the throughline across both episodes: distance learning works when it's designed with intention — for a specific population, with local support built in, and with educators who actually know how to deliver it. The research has been pointing at that for thirty years. The question for you is what it changes about the decisions you're making right now. Thanks for listening to Why Distance Learning, and we'll see you next time.