Networked Learning: Inviting Redefinition

From Emergency Remote Teaching to Networked LearningIn the opening months of 2020, educational institutions in many countries showed themselves capable of making dramatic changes in their ways of working.These moves were occasioned by the Covid-19 pandemic, though the actual responses of institutions were shaped by quite diverse factors.A common strategy was to use digital communications technologies to continue with some fundamental elements of educational provision.In the higher education sector, commentators and university leaders began to refer to this as a 'pivot' to 'online learning '. Hodges et al. (2020), Czerniewicz (2020) and others have reminded us of the importance of language in large-scale shifts of this kind.For example, reviews of research showing that online learning can produce academic outcomes equivalent to face-to-face or 'on campus' teaching may be used to quieten students' concerns about the quality of their changed educational experiences.Such arguments, while often well-intentioned, use a sleight-of-hand that equates professionally designed online programs with rapidly-improvised forms of teaching.Less wellintentioned arguments may be used to propose ongoing cuts to resources or the 'unbundling' of university services to allow profitable parts of university education to be taken over by commercial providers, through the monetised successors to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), for example (Selwyn 2020).So language choices matter.As universities plan their ways forward, how they describe past, current and future arrangements may have significant consequences.Hodges et al. ( 2020) suggest the term 'emergency remote teaching' for the improvised arrangements that were quickly set in place in the first half of 2020.But how should we describe more planful arrangements, going forward?'Online learning' has always been an awkward term -not least, because, like 'digital', 'distance', and 'virtual', it can obscure the embodied and physically situated nature of learning (Fawns 2018).Students live in a complex social-material-digital world and the learning places they make affect how they learn.There is a small body of good research on how so-called 'online' and 'distance' students make places to study -at home, at work and elsewhere (e.g.Jaldemark 2008;Jones and Healing 2010;Bayne et al. 2013;Gourlay and Oliver 2018).The Covid-19 'lockdown' has been generating anecdotes and further insights into the effects of home-based learning places on opportunities for study.University leaders who are planning the staged re-opening of campuses are picking up the language of 'blended learning', to indicate how the future pattern of educational provision will involve a mixture of home-based 'online' and campus-based 'face-to-face' provision.In crude terms, the former will deal with 'theory' and 'content' and the latter with 'hands-on skills' (science lab classes, engineering workshops, clinics, etc).Although there is a literature on 'blended' learning, the term is slippery to define (Oliver and Trigwell 2005;Bliuc et al. 2007;Hrastinski 2019).For some meta-analyses and research reviews, it has been operationalised in such a stark way that the findings bear little relationship to contemporary educational practice (Means et al. 2013;Bernard et al. 2014).Many university students in richer countries now carry laptops and mobile phones.Wellresourced students can view lectures at times and in places that suit them (lockdown regulations