What is the Future of Modality in Education?

As technology continues to evolve, so too does the landscape of education. Valerie Irvine’s exploration of “The Landscape of Merging Modalities” highlights how the concept of modality in education has transformed from face to face or online teaching into a complex system of hybrid models. This represents an exciting opportunity to innovate and a challenge to ensure accessibility for learners and educators alike.

The Landscape of Merging Modalities

In the past, the choice of modality was straightforward. In the early days of online learning, the lack of high-speed internet limited educators to asynchronous, mostly text-based communication. This simplicity made it easy to understand. With advances to technology there are more possibilities and many new terms like HyFlex, Multi-Access, and Blended Synchronous.

These changes are also a pedagogical shift. What ultimately matters is how well the educator is able to design their course and present it to a wide variety of learning types.

As an online student right now I am very appreciative of the chance to learn from a distance. Students from across BC getting together to engage in discussions on technology in education is not something that would have been possible in the beginning of my career. However, I can also see many downsides. There is pressure on students to be able to access these online communities and in many remote areas that’s not always possible.

We can all agree that we need to make sure that our education system is flexible and able to adapt to student needs. That means having face-to-face, multi-access and online access to education for everyone but we are not ready. As a teacher who has been teaching face-to-face for 25 years it is difficult to wrap my brain around the idea of multi access. I have flashbacks to the pandemic where I had students in my classroom, students learning at home with paper packages, students learning from home with plans and lessons I posted online and students learning one-on-one with me through the Teams app and it was a nightmare. No matter how districts, schools and teachers decide to provide resources to students I am sure we can all agree that careful planning needs to be in place, long before the first students show up.