The effects of “learning recovery” continue to ripple around the world in education, following various periods of full or partial school closures in different countries.

In many places, these issues are complex and will take some time for the impact on young people to be fully understood.

Yet, we all saw that through this adversity came many positives - perhaps most clearly the potential for online learning to augment our teaching.

This situation wasn’t always easy - as a London comprehensive headteacher during the pandemic, I remember vividly delivering laptops and internet connections to students in our community on New Year’s Eve to make sure they could plug in the moment online learning started in January 2021.

Inspiring independent learners 

As the world moves on - and I have, too, into a new role as international director at Wellington College - I wonder if we can now reimagine the discussion around online learning into something positive and productive, even powerful, when it comes to the future of education?

Many schools, Wellington included, extol the virtue somewhere in their vision or mission statement, of their desire to foster independence in their students, including in their learning.

While there are myriad ways to do all this, online learning certainly provides an opportunity for a school to live up to the aspiration of independence and support a student’s own decisions about the place, pace and passion for their own learning.

After all, in any asynchronous content, the student is in the driving seat about when they engage with their learning, unrestricted by time zones and other competing commitments. They are also free to choose the pace with which they progress through it beyond the confines of a lesson.

This all makes sense - classroom walls and the regimented school timetable do not always offer the opportunity to get lost in a topic, and the chance to emerge enriched and energised is much greater when the pace and path of learning is something a student has chosen for themself.

Furthermore, it seems this route works for numerous learner types.

We noticed learning gains, for example, among students who were sometimes reluctant to verbalise their ideas in a classroom discussion. Contributing to an online discussion forum takes that barrier away and allows a teacher to assess learning for their class just as effectively.

Meanwhile, we also noticed a particular gain in attainment for our most able students, who had been able to dive deeper into topics that had particularly interested them, without the limit of time in a 50-minute lesson.

Providing guidance 

Of course, the ability to read and research online has always been there for pupils and teachers have always provided extensive reading lists and enrichment material.

But having been forced online, we can now see a chance for students to be directed to this in a much more personal way and engage with them in this - not least through commentating on work and prompting new avenues of enquiry or exploration.

This is all good stuff in the moment it is happening - but it could also have long-term benefits, too, by helping students maintain more breadth in their learning.

This matters because we all see how, as students progress through school, they are required to develop more specialisation at the expense of broad knowledge; the number of subjects falls from a key stage 3 programme of perhaps 14 subjects to 10 GCSEs and then six International Baccalaureate subjects, or three to four A levels.

In all this, we hold those high-end qualifications in the highest esteem - valuing depth over breadth.

But if we give students the online study skills to follow their own interests in the right avenues, perhaps we can enable students to keep the breadth by maintaining a focus on what they enjoy - while further developing the depth they need for that current educational stage.

Thinking digitally for all subjects 

Furthermore, we as educators must also keep our minds open to the possibility of online learning in all subjects.

Performance subjects, for example, might seem like a particular challenge for online learning, but even here there are opportunities to be more inclusive than in conventional schooling, as director of performing arts at Dulwich College (Singapore) Katrina Hegarty comments.

“The particular strength was around aspects of monologue, where in solo performance, students made amazing progress. By pre-filming examples, ideas and instructions, students know more before they start. They can pause and rewatch and really get to grips with new concepts and different practitioners.

“They filmed themselves in different spaces and found really creative ways to explore this. We can give really precise feedback from this, too, which has helped deepen the performance process for our students.”

Meanwhile, it is not just in the act of teaching that online engagements offer new ideas for teachers - feedback, too, can be enhanced if used correctly, as the principal of North London Collegiate School, Dubai, Jamie Monaghan outlines.

“In terms of longer lasting useful change, the setting of homework, marking of all work and feedback certainly brought about some useful tools for teachers and leaders. Feedback through recorded messages is really powerful and accessible.”

We know online learning doesn’t work for all students all of the time, and the challenges of the last few years are real and tangible for many people. We must not lose sight of the continuing support, we must provide and recognise not everyone will move at the same pace on this journey.

Doing it on our own terms

But we should also look at the situation we are now in as an opportunity - to experiment, innovate and transform on our own terms.

After all, much of the online learning we have engaged in so far was done because we had to due to lockdowns and school closures.

Now, though, we have the opportunity to see how learners might thrive in an online educational environment they are choosing to do simply because they want to learn like this and we want to teach like this.

When isolation is not a requirement, the amount of potential unlocked has not yet been measured.

We should see it as a chance to set children free on their education in a way that we haven’t previously been able to imagine. That’s something that should excite us all.

Chris Woolf is the international director at Wellington College International