Remote Learning Strategies: Beyond the Pandemic

This month’s episode explores how remote and digital learning has evolved beyond emergency pandemic measures into strategic, purpose-driven educational approaches. DLAC’s John Watson distinguishes between emergency remote learning during the pandemic and today’s well-planned online and hybrid models. He emphasizes that effective digital programs are driven by specific educational needs—whether supporting CTE (Career and Technical Education), dropout recovery, or creating early college opportunities—rather than by technology itself.

Guest speaker John Watson is the founder of DLAC (formerly Evergreen Education Group), which has been a leading consulting and advisory firm serving school districts, state agencies, foundations, and companies in the K-12 digital learning field for more than 20 years.

The computer-generated transcript is below:

Kevin Hogan
OK. Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Innovations in Education. East School News podcast, where we explore the innovation, shaping education in the digital age. I’m your host,
Kevin Hogan. And on this month’s episode, we’re diving into the evolving world of remote learning strategy. Now, the COVID pandemic thrust schools into emergency remote teaching mode virtually overnight. But now, years later, how have those experiences shaped more intentional approaches to digital education? And what does the future hold as? Yep, there’s that acronym again, AI. Begins to transform what’s possible. My conversation with John Watson today features insights from his experiences working with school districts around the country. He shares how schools are moving beyond emergency measures to create purpose driven online and hybrid programs. In this conversation, we explore how today’s remote learning differs from that pandemic era emergency teaching. We talked about why relationships remain critical in virtual environments. John talks about the surprising ways schools are using digital platforms for everything from dropout recovery to career education. And of course, we touch upon the potential revolutionary impact of AI on educational content. So whether you’re a district leader, tech director, or classroom teacher, I think you’ll discover how schools are strategically implementing remote options to be something that you might want to think about for your own work. Have a listen, OK? John, thanks so much for joining me today. It’s great to see you, although virtually remotely right as as we use these remote learning platforms and as we mentioned and talked about before, we started recording the last time I saw you, we were in the depths of the pandemic and now thankfully we’re kind of on the on the other end of that however. You know, we still have the vestiges of it for, for better or for worse, and especially when it comes to the ideas of remote learning strategies, maybe we just dive right into things, talk about the state of play. From your perspective, when it comes to the idea of remote learning.

John Watson
What we’re seeing in remote learning, digital learning broadly is. We defined digital learning as all these instances where students are learning outside of the time and place constraints that you see in a traditional school in a traditional. Trick now that sometimes takes the form of a fully online school, but that’s actually fairly rare. What we’re seeing much more commonly is students who are mixing on site and online learning. Sometimes those are formal hybrid schools, a hybrid school, that is, that actually has some days where students are learning from home, other days where students are learning from school. What we’re also seeing, though, is a lot of really interesting different use cases that people don’t necessarily think of as online or hybrid or digital in any form. So for instance. When you think about CTE, a lot of CTE is combining online and face to face, in part because there’s a lot of CTE that you can deliver remotely. But then the other piece is that we see a lot of cases when schools are implementing really impactful innovative CD programs that may involve students leaving to go work on a job site. Or work at a different building and in order to free up, let’s say, when I say a different building. What I mean by that is it might be an Innovation Center or maker space or something that the school district has as well as it might be something out in the. In order to free up the time for the student to be able to go have that experience that may be during school hours and that student may now be taking a couple of online courses to free up the time. In their schedule. So there’s these two examples of how CTE taps into online learning. Seeing some really interesting early college and middle college schools that are located on Community College campuses. Was that one of these a a really great one out in California just a few weeks ago. These are using online courses as well as and and a hybrid schedule and students are taking Community College courses. So when they graduate from high school, they’re well on their way to an associates degree. I was chatting with a longtime friend of mine who’s. Working in dropout recovery, so there’s a lot of dropout recovery programs that you may be. You’re with and. To my knowledge, what the examples I’m seeing are hybrid or online, and it makes a ton of sense because it’s not like these students who are coming back in are typically going back into a regular mainstream school in the traditional district. So these are hybrid digital programs. As well, so you have all these different examples that are out there. Really important to recognize these are all different than the remote emergency learning that happened during the pandemic, which was so recent, although it’s hard to believe it was what, five years ago now. Yeah, all these schools had to pivot to being remote and incredibly short periods of time and they did incredibly. Valuable heroic work to pull that off, but it was very different. There’s no way that you could expect an entirely new instructional model to be implemented in a few days or a weekend or a week like we saw a lot of cases where the teachers and school leaders were putting their plans together over a spring break. And then. The school, quote UN quote, came back, but it came back remotely after a week. You know, these online and hybrid school. Those will often go through a year of planning and then a year of A at A at a deliberately small number of students in a pilot status. And so instead of a year of planning plus a year of of small size or pilot status, the programs for emergency remote learning were being put together. A weekend or a week.

Kevin Hogan
Yeah. And so you know, for our readers and for our listeners who who went through that, and again, I, I’d like that distinction between that experience and what you see these tools being implemented now is. There are a strategic difference when district leaders should be thinking about these things. I mean, you talk about dropout recovery for instance. I mean, it’s program first technology, second right? I mean it’s. Not.

John Watson
Yeah, absolutely, yes.

Kevin Hogan
Programs aren’t there for for the sake of the technology, it’s the vice versa.

John Watson
And not only that, I I’ve seen exceedingly few cases where you could really say the technology is driving the problem. These programs in almost all cases are being driven by. What’s the need that a school or student or a family or parents are trying to figure out? What? What’s the problem they’re trying to solve? And at a school or district level, it may be trying to offer more course options. It may be trying to bring students. Back in who have dropped out and maybe from a traditional district perspective, cause we see a lot of trade. Districts offering their own online or hybrid academies, they’re trying to reach students and families who may have left for a different option. Some of those have gone private. Some of those have have become homeschool families, but those students and families, even if they like some aspects of let’s use the home schooling example, they may like some. Aspects of homeschooling, but they also realized they missed some of the socialization they missed. Some of the extracurriculars that they may be able to get in other ways, but they all felt like, hey, a school is a great option for sports and music and theater and all those. The other clubs and other pieces that they’re interested in, and so you see these districts that have some level of an entrepreneurial spirit and some of them do not as many quite honestly as I would like. And I think there’s no question that when you think. About. What creates a successful school and district? There, that’s not necessarily selecting for people who are entrepreneurially minded. And I mean that in a very value free way. It’s just the way it is. If you’re climbing up the ranks of school or district leadership, it’s probably not because you’re taking a lot of risks. There’s a lot of reasons. The public schools are. Tending towards the side of being, risk averse and some of that starts with all the regulations that the States and the feds put onto public schools. That’s a whole different conversation. But The thing is, what what we see is that more and more district leaders are having to be entrepreneurial. They’re they’re having to think about in this time of declining enrollments. How do we bring? Students and families back and thinking about innovative ways to do that.

Kevin Hogan
Yeah. Now there are a lot of products and services focused specifically on the education space, especially kind of like at a district wide sort of level. On the other hand, there are a lot of kind of traditional vanilla. I mean, we’re talking on zoom right now, right. But then you could go through Microsoft 365 and you can go through Google Classroom and and a lot of these tools are kind of baked into the kind of the everyday tools that we’re using already. Do you have recommendations for districts? On whether or not they need to go to another level when it comes to, depending on what the program is that they’re looking to make remote, or at least offer those sort of remote aspects into that dynamic.

John Watson
Absolutely. When you think about most of the technology that gets used in a mainstream school in a traditional district. Most of the technology is being used in a classroom that doesn’t look too different than a classroom looks like when you. And I were. In school, what that means is that technology use case is very different than the technology use case in an online or hybrid school. In which that remote technology, the need for communications between students and teachers, quite possibly the need for communications and collaborations between students, the much higher level need for sharing of resources and using them and really interactive way. All these things become mission critical for an online or a hybrid school, because if you’re in a mainstream school, traditional district technology fails one day. What do you do? Well, you go. Back to what you were doing prior. If that fails and you’re on a remote day in a hybrid school, you got major problems, so you just lost your infrastructure. And so it’s a different level. Without any names specifically, I’ll mention there’s a there’s a product out there that. Probably everyone of your listeners would know, and some people refer to it as a learning management system, but people in our delac community would say now that’s not now on us because that is not powerful enough to support real instruction and learning online. At a distance. And that’s not to say it’s a bad product. It’s a great product for a certain use case, but it’s not the digital learning use case as we define it.
Speaker
Yeah.

Kevin Hogan
Yeah. Now I know that you find that relationships are hugely important when it comes to the establishment of remote learning situations. Can you talk a little bit about how to make those relationships work in a remote environment? It’s. Talking about the students and the importance of inclusivity in the classrooms and I I know. Dei has suddenly become a dirty word somehow, but I always felt in our conversations before there was a good thing. How are those things applied in a remote setup? Have you seen examples of that working, and if so, what are some of the best practices to kind of establish the culture that all Ed tech leaders know is important in person? How do you extrapolate that to the to the to the Internet?

John Watson
So first of all I want to just echo the point that you’re making in your question, which is in these online settings relationships and student engagement are absolutely critical and I don’t. Want to make it sound like this is a completely solved issue we have within our digital learning community. These conversations all the time with our member schools about, OK, how do you engage students? What does that look? Like it actually starts with some pretty simple things. If you’re an online school. The experienced online school, make sure they’re reaching out to make contact with students and for younger students with caregivers, with families from the start, let me give you a super simple example. Relatively inexperienced school might say. Ohh yeah, if a student. Wasn’t logged in by three or four days after the start of the semester. We reach out to them. Experienced school says, Oh no. We started the outreach the week before this. Muster like if it’s day one and we don’t have a sign of engagement, we know we already have a problem and we don’t start collecting the data on day one or day 2 or day three. We start thinking about what we need to do ahead of time and then doing that outreach. So make sure that students and families know that we are there and we’re seeking. To connect with them. So that’s, that’s one thing. Second thing, interesting thing that came out of the. Pandemic. That emergency remote learning that I talked about and a lot of cases there were traditional school districts that. Were having kids on video for hours a day. That wasn’t a great approach. The deal like team works remotely. We don’t wanna spend hours a day on video, right? We’re we’re working in different ways and online students are doing the same. But having said that pre pandemic. Online schools were tending to not use very much video. They weren’t tending to use. All that much synchronous interaction with and synchronous interaction these days does mostly mean video. Now I think part of that is because when you think about a lot of these online schools, they date back to the earliest ones were in the mid to late 1990s and then you have a lot of these schools that were starting in the early to mid 2000s and certainly there been plenty of others that have started more recently. But some of these more experienced ones started in the days when bandwidth and video technology simply didn’t allow. You know for high quality video discussions like you and I are having now, we couldn’t do this when online schools were starting. And even after online schools have been around for a little while, we’d be doing this and then you’d be frozen. And then I’d be frozen. And wow, that does not work. If you got a group of students with a teacher that’s different now and online schools are recognizing and so. One of the things that we see them building in. Are more opportunities for synchronous video interaction. That doesn’t mean a student and a teacher being online for four hours a day, but it does mean regular check-ins. It might mean some tutoring opportunities. It might mean check-ins like we’ve seen with some younger age students and and schools and classrooms. They’ll do something that that they’ll call home room. It’s like everybody. It’s online at the same time in the morning for 1/2 hour and it might be a discussion about hey, how are you feeling today? What are your plans, how what we know we’ve got these different things that we’re working on. How are you all thinking about doing those things? So it just creates this sense of community and.
Speaker
It’s.

John Watson
It’s incredibly powerful. Not just having the one-on-one engagement between the student and the teacher or the family and the school, but between students as well, and between families. And you create the sense of, yeah, this online school or this hybrid school is a community, and we’ve got. Each other, and yeah, we might not see each other face to face, but we’re gonna be able to see each other over video. We’re gonna be able to chat sometimes text chat in real time. Sometimes being on video, all these pieces and being really creative about the ways that those things. Work.

Kevin Hogan
Now talk a little bit about where you see. This evolution continuing right, I mean we were kind of watching it come from where you say, you know, making the distinction between that emergency real time experience that we had to some maybe real solid-state sort of models of remote and hybrid that are here here to stay look into your crystal ball a little bit. I mean where where is this heading? There are some if if the technologies play out. If the the funding plays out, if all things being equal and and positive, where do you see some of these strategies and technologies going?

John Watson
I’m going to give you 2 answers to this and answer 1 is during the. Mimic a lot of students and families and teachers realized that emergency remote learning. Wasn’t for them. At the same time, even though there wasn’t time prep time to make it a great experience overall, there were a bunch of students and families and teachers who felt like, yeah, I really like this and that has led to an increase in the number of students in all of these different online and hybrid schools. And these digital programs pre pandemic, there was a steady. Growth. It wasn’t explosive, but it was steady growth and basically what we saw was this jump up during the pandemic and then a drop off after the pandemic. But a settling down at a higher level. So basically you see this increased pre pandemic. You see the numbers go up come down and if you were to draw a. Line. It’s like line up step function up and then the trajectory of increase of slow steady increase continuous but now at a significantly higher level and that’s significantly higher level. Really encompasses a lot of these pieces that I mentioned around CTE and dual credit and drop out recovery programs. All these other things, so pre pandemic. When people used to say things like, Oh yeah, there’s blended learning all around us and and my response was, you know, in in more mainstream schools and be like, you know, there’s a definitional issue there. But to me that looks a lot like using technology in a traditional classroom. Now we are truly at the point where there’s a lot more of these different cases of these. Digital programs that are transcending barriers of time and space, and part of that is the experience that a lot of people had during the pandemic. Part of it is the pandemic spurred a lot more adoption of computers, laptops, better Internet bandwidth, all those pieces. That schools and students are now more likely to have and and if you have that embedded it in the district or in the school, it becomes that much easier to adapt that basic foundational technology to a different type of use case. Again, I’ll use CT as an. Sample so we see all those things going on and we see that growth in. These different ways. So that’s one version of the answer to your question. Here’s the other version of your of an answer to. Your. Question because of what AI is doing, we have no idea. What’s coming next?

Kevin Hogan
We. That almost 20 minutes in and and we hadn’t mentioned AI, that was pretty good. That’s a world record.

John Watson
I think there’s a Kevin you and I have talked over the years. So you you may recognize this about me. I have over the years been a technology skeptic in our field. Our our field depends on basic founded foundational levels of technology. But over the years. When people would say things like Ohh VR, it’s gonna transform education. Augmented reality, gamification on and on is like like every one of those cases. Like I’ll believe it when. I see it. I don’t believe it. Yeah. This is the first technology that I think is gonna do it, and the reason is because I think this technology is going to completely overwhelm society and I am quite concerned that education is not ready. One of the things that we do with our small delac team, we have a we share consistently like what’s the latest crazy thing you’ve done with technology, with AI. And. I worry that especially within the mainstream schools. Those folks don’t have the time to do this kind of experimentation. I think the teachers who can do it tend to be outliers. And I also think that when you consider the changes that are going to. Need to be made to take advantage of AI technologies that can’t happen at an individual classroom level. They have to happen in a school and systems level. And I’m just not seeing it. I see the guidance that comes out and I know it’s it’s well intended and it’s needed, but it’s not close to being sufficient.

Kevin Hogan
Yeah.

John Watson
So since we’re doing this as a podcast. Are you familiar with the podcasting, quote, UN quote, podcasting capability of the Google product notebook LM? No. Let me give you an example. I uploaded we did a a recent Delac report on remote testing, so it’s just the idea that online students, students and online schools have to test in a face to face environment. It causes all sorts of problems. I uploaded that report into this product called Notebook LM, which is a Google product because we use Google for our workspace, it’s it’s free for. I mean it’s no additional cost right in 4 minutes notebook LM produced. What sounded exactly like a podcast of two people discussing that report. And when I played it for somebody who is highly experienced and knows this field has been in technology for education technology for decades, but just didn’t know this particular thing to to blown away, people are blown away by this and. And so this is. Why I say like it’s like. Every few weeks, something comes along. That’s just mind blowing and.

Kevin Hogan
You just made. You just made me obsolete in 2 minutes. But I I know I understand what you’re saying. I.

John Watson
Mean it’s you’re not absolute that you can say so here’s what I expect of notebook LM. Apparently I haven’t played with this tool. You can inject yourself in so like you can interact with the AI to have conversations as well. Actually, what’s happening is I made myself obsolete. You can run podcasts.
Speaker
That’s why.

John Watson
Without having to without needing guests.

Kevin Hogan
All we need is our avatars, right?
Speaker
It’s.

John Watson
You know it. It’s the. The concept of AGI, artificial General intelligence, and I know that that in some circles that term gets banded around a lot, others are just are not as familiar with. It’s just basically the idea that where somewhere on the order of two to three years and I see this from a lot of different sources that I trust. 2-3 years from the point where AI’s will be indistinguishable from people. Except the way they’re distinguishable from the average person is these AI’s will know everything that’s been known to people at all. So it’s like talk to all the smartest people in every field, wrapped into one person. That is what’s gonna be available. And the latest thing that I’ve really noticed around. What I think of as people who have a sense for how impactful this is versus those who don’t. And so if there’s one thing I would around AI that I would leave your listeners with. If you’re not using the voice function. Of AI you have to use the voice functions because AI talks back to you and it doesn’t sound anything like Siri from not too long ago or any of those other ones like this podcast through notebook L that I’m telling you about, there are the umm. In Oz that people like us have, there’s what sounds like breathing. You know, it’s like, I mean it’s it’s, it’s crazy, it’s crazy. I already I I’m aware of some of the schools in our community that are using AI technology to completely rethink how they’re developing course content.
Speaker
Wow. Wow. Yes.

John Watson
So one of these is a a state funded program that is absolutely convinced that. Just about every school district in the country will be able to create all their own content with within a very short period of. Time. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. I could. I certainly see the argument, and even if that’s not exactly true or exactly true in that time frame, yeah, it’s certainly going to be transformative for how all sorts of content. That’s created and you think about within content creation, you think about the idea that how hard it is for anybody who’s created. Being content across multiple states to think about state standards and things like that, now it’s going to become incredibly easy once you train an AI to do it. But then you think about all the other things you know that there’s been. There’s been discussion about personalized learning, obviously for decades now. I think it’s truly gonna be here when you think about you. Take the US history course you develop it. The capability. If it doesn’t already exist, we’re not far from being able to say OK, now give me a version of that course for an English language learner. Now give me a version of that course for a student who’s a little bit behind on their reading skills. Now give me a version of that course for this and that and the other. And it’s gonna be pretty close to like, hit a button and and wait for the AI to kick it back to you in a little while.

Kevin Hogan
Yeah, it’s amazing stuff and always exciting and maybe a little bit scary at the same time as this decade has proven out to be so John well.

John Watson
Thank you so much.

Kevin Hogan
Thank you so much for your time and and your insights. I really appreciate it and I know our readers and listeners do too and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.

John Watson
Thank you, Kevin. Always appreciate your work and the opportunity to be on with you.

Kevin Hogan
And that’s about it for this month’s edition of Innovations and Education, be sure to go up onto eschoolnews.com to check out other episodes as well as dig into the multitude of resources that each school has to help you properly integrate technology into the day-to-day workings. Of your classrooms? I’m Kevin Hogan, and thanks for listening.