Re-defining online learning and distance education in 2020

This blog is almost 12 years old. I now have nearly 4,500 posts on the site. Many of the old posts are accessed frequently even today. However, some of them have been there since 2008, and in this field 12 years is a long time. As a result, I’m going back to some of the key earlier posts and updating them.

One of my first posts was ‘What do you mean by distance education?’ where I tried to give definitions for common key words or phrases in the field. 

I had to update this a few years later and renamed it ‘What do you mean by….?‘ Over the years this post has been accessed over 85,000 times.

I’ve now updated this post again to take account of emergency remote learning, hyflex and other more recent developments, and in doing so had to change slightly definitions of some existing terms such as online learning. You can find the new version here. 

Also the Quality Assurance Assurance Agency for Higher Education in the UK (yes, there really is such an agency in Britain) has just issued a very useful guide to terminology in this field where these terms are discussed in more detail:

QAA (2020) Guidance: Building a Taxonomy for Digital Learning, June 25

There is no equivalent of the Academie Française in English. If you disagree with my definitions (or the QAA’s) please use the comment box below the updated post. These terms, as I explain, should not be cast in stone and should be discussed and refined as teaching and learning develops. 

Also if there are other older – or even newer – posts that you feel need updating, please let me know (I don’t have enough time left to check every one of the 4,500 posts!).