While so much was being declared unprecedented over the last year, whenever the conversation focused on distance education, I was constantly reminded of claims and assertions I've been hearing on and off over the past two decades.

For all the unprecedenteds of this pandemic year, many moments from these past two semesters have felt like déjà vu to me.

It seems every ten years or so, some major event leads to a huge push to use technology to transform, redesign, reinvent or dismantle-and-reassemble higher education. At the turn of the millennium, it was the development of course management systems and widespread adoption of online courses. Around 2010 it was edupunk or "do-it-yourself" education. In 2020, it was the coronavirus pandemic forcing us into widespread remote courses.

Now, as then, we see that administration and faculty can have differing motivations to pursue online education. Administrators tend to focus on what will attract tuition and fee-paying students, and faculty tend to focus on maintaining academic quality—but these are not opposing interests. That is, faculty also want sufficient students enrolled to help ensure our members are gainfully employed, and we don't believe at all that administration harbors a secret desire to turn SCCC into an online diploma mill.

But still we keep hearing things that remind us that now, as then, faculty voices need to be central to conversations about the future of distance education at SCCC.

Below I offer four pandemic lessons that sparked déjà vu moments echoing conversations from the past twenty years.

In the beginning

In 2000, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) published Distance Education: Guidelines for Good Practice to provide research-based advice on bargaining for distance education. I had already been teaching online courses for two years at that point and, in 2002, was invited to write a research piece about the value of hybrid classes for the AFT Higher Ed Technology Review because, after about five years of an enormous push for fully asynchronous courses and programs, colleges realized that they were not, after all, educating people across the globe as they had imagined but rather the majority of students in their online classes were the same students sitting in their dorms and in their on-campus classes.

Many of you will recall this happening in SUNY. SLN had launched in 1995 with eight online classes and by 2000 boasted over 1,500. I remember sitting in SLN workshops back then and asking about blended/hybrid classes, only to have Bill Pelz or Alexandria Pickett respond that to offer those would be to defy the very purpose of distance education. That story changed in May 2002, when SLN finally released CourseSpace to enable blended/hybrid and web-enhanced classes; at the time, SLN noted on their website, "in response to SUNY campus and faculty demand [CourseSpace] accommodates courses which integrate online activities into an on-campus classroom course… positioning them at the forefront of high quality, system-based online course delivery."

Looking back at my 2003 AFT Technology Review article, "The Inevitable Convergence of Bricks and Clicks: The Pedagogical Effectiveness of Hybrid Courses and Implications for Higher Ed Faculty and Unions," as well as one I wrote for the September 2011 issue of The WORD titled "Do-it-yourself university with no conventional instructors: The next big thing in online education?", I am struck by how much the more things change, the more things stay the same.

Lesson 1: Students want to be on campus

• Pandemic lesson — Last year we held our collective breath as we heard continuing announcements about the decline in student enrollments. Knowing that student tuition and fees carry about 1/2 of the college's operating budget rather than the 1/3 it's supposed to be, we were deeply concerned about the negative impacts on the college. Enrollment continued to flounder too, until our ETU members set up and our counseling & advising members bravely worked on-campus enrollment sessions over the summer.
  
  Then the students showed up, resulting in an overall enrollment drop of just 8%. Students wanted to speak with someone in person to plan their academic lives. They didn't want to try to figure it out by themselves online. And we believe the majority of SCCC students do better in on-campus or hybrid classes too.
  
  
• Déjà vu — By the late 1990s, most American colleges and universities were offering some online courses amidst plenty of lofty rhetoric about how we'd soon be educating people across the world. What we found instead, however, is that "the majority of students taking distance education courses actually live in close proximity to their instructors." Students were taking a mix of online and on-campus courses, and really not much has changed: As of fall 2018, NCES reports that only 12% of students at undergraduate public institutions like SCCC were enrolled exclusively in online courses.
  
  While we often hear administrators here point out that online sections of our courses fill first as part of the push for yet more online courses and entire programs, we need to keep perspective: Online sections average only about 10-15% of our total sections, and until recently they had a lower class cap, which contributed to their filling first.
  
  We in the FA support online course offerings, of course, but firmly believe that they should supplement, not supplant, on-campus and hybrid offerings.
  

Lesson 2: Listen to the experts

• Pandemic lesson — Last year I heard a constant, anguished refrain from colleagues and friends: "Why can't people just listen to the experts!?" Many were expressing frustration about friends or relatives who refused to believe Dr. Anthony Fauci's pandemic advice because they "did their own research." Others were frustrated with friends or relatives who refused to listen to experts advancing solutions for a more fair, more equitable, less racist nation. Yet some times the individuals upset at others for not listening to the experts are the same individuals who won't listen to faculty voices when it comes to distance ed.
  
  
• Déjà vu — In 1997 business guru Peter Drucker predicted in Forbes that "Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won't survive. ...Already we are beginning to deliver more lectures and classes off campus via satellite or two-way video at a fraction of the cost. The college won't survive as a residential institution. Today's buildings are hopelessly unsuited and totally unneeded." The President of Columbia University's Teachers College, Arthur Levine, famously intimated in a 2000 New York Times article that bricks-and-mortar colleges would soon be obsolete. "Why," he had asked earlier that year, "do we need the physical plant called the college?"
  
  Educause's NLII and Carol Twigg were also calling for the disaggregation or unbundling of the faculty role. Twigg's work was focused on trying to "reduce or remove the need for direct student and faculty interaction, providing students with greater independence" so they can "study at their own pace" using new instructional software.
  
  Fast forward to 2011 and it's the same old story, but with Southern New Hampshire University's Paul LeBlanc predicting the demise of on-campus higher education, describing a future with "no conventional instructors" as students would teach themselves online at their own pace and "subject experts" would "monitor" their online discussions. "And the education could be far cheaper because there would be no expensive instructor," he added. LeBlanc was far from alone. Anya Kamenetz was also hawking her "do-it-yourself university" book, in which she teaches readers how to take numerous shortcuts to a college credential to save money. She also declares the future of higher ed is in the unbundling of the faculty role and finds "the breakdown of the university" exciting.
  
  To my mind, the "faster, better, cheaper" mantra is a fabulous one—if we're talking about fast food. When it comes to education, however, I don't know that students are well served by truncating the experience, especially the students typically served by community colleges.
  
  More to the point, as we learned again last year, it is imperative that we recognize, respect and listen to the experts. The predictions of Drucker, Levine, Kamenetz and LeBlanc haven't come true, precisely because they ignore the basic, core fact that faculty are the experts. Faculty are constantly raising legitimate concerns about quality online courses, student identification (making sure the student is doing the student's work), accurate assessment of student work and addressing plagiarism and cheating. We need to keep faculty voices central to the conversations about the future of distance ed.
  

Social justice matters

• Pandemic lesson — Last year was a milestone in terms of increased awareness of racial injustices. Video taken by Darnella Frazier of the May 25 death of George Floyd propelled tens of thousands of people into the streets after a long list of deaths of Black Americans had made headlines. As books about and workshops addressing racism exploded in popularity, millions more Americans awakened to the need to address systemic racism and fight for a more just, equitable, diverse and inclusive country.
  
  In the world of distance education, we were also reminded of class-based social injustices, as colleges scrambled to provide technology to students who found themselves in remote courses but didn't have the reliable internet access or laptop that are essential for participation.
  
  
• Déjà vu — When online classes were first becoming widespread, people would practically croon about how wonderful they would be for working mothers who were busy juggling work, family and college obligations. I'll never forget being at a NYSUT meeting and hearing an older woman push back against that notion. "The busy working mom," she asserted, "is probably wishing more than anyone that she could have the space and time for herself to attend on-campus classes, to be able to get away from everything, escape to campus and focus on her own intellectual development."
  
  Indeed, rather than being "the great equalizer," higher ed has been analyzed by many smart people as perpetuating and even exacerbating social disparities. A worse case scenario would be to have on-campus education become the domain of the haves—those with the financial means to enjoy a traditional, residential, ivy-covered college campus experience—and an online-only education become the domain of the have nots, students who have no choice but to work full time or hold multiple jobs or who have family or other obligations that prevent them from being on campus.
  
  As I had argued in my AFT Technology Review piece, those are precisely the students who benefit most from the socialization offered on campus (e.g., the modeling provided by professors, interactions with diverse peers), who gain the most from Campus Activities events and who might most need the space and time to focus on their own personal and intellectual development. Racially and otherwise minoritized students also tend to benefit from on-campus student support services and in-person technology assistance.
  

Research, evidence and data also matter

• Pandemic lesson — Years of misinformation and disinformation seem to have culminated in an explosion last year, with false information flowing from a variety of sources about politics, about the media, about elections, about racism, about the pandemic. If we learned nothing else from the past year, we realized that "Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge." Research, evidence and data truly matter when it comes to preventing and countering disinformation campaigns. It is incumbent on every single one us, we learned, to be mindful of our assumptions, our biases and our word choice when expressing ideas and beliefs.
  
  
• Déjà vu — We've heard too many administrators point to various aspects of distance ed and make conclusions that seem to align with their foregone conclusions about distance ed. For example, all spring, we heard multiple administrators state that a large percentage (most said 2/3) of continuing students had enrolled in remote sections for fall 2021 and, therefore, "they must be having some success in the remote modalities."
  
  There are obviously other reasons why students would sign up for remote sections which have nothing to do with perceived student success. Full-time faculty opted for most of the fully online and remote sections, so when these assertions were being made, online and remote sections were mostly the ones with faculty names on them in MySCCC (adjunct assignments hadn't yet been made). And we know that students don't like registering for classes that say instructor "TBA;" they can't ask their friends about or look up "TBA" on ratemyprofessor.com, and students fear the "TBA" sections are more likely to be canceled.
  
  This claim of student success in remote sections also stands in direct contrast with the faculty voices we've been hearing all year, most of whom have described how students have been struggling in remote sections. Now, the students may largely be earning passing grades, sure, but our members have been dealing with rampant cheating, teaching to quiet blank rectangles, panicked and anxious student emails and an exorbitant number of students needing individualized exceptions to help them pass their classes.
  
  Further, too many administrators persist in pointing to student grades as a measure of student success, and we in the FA find this problematic. Outside of properly administered and analyzed assessment processes, we do not believe much of anything can be truly said about whether students are succeeding or what students are learning—and we are certainly skeptical of any claims being made that compare student academic outcomes for online, remote and on-campus courses.
  
  

The next twenty years

So as we step boldly into the next decades of distance education, we need to continue to think carefully about the place of online courses in higher education and about the unique, amazing space that is a college campus, yes, even a commuter college campus.

We are the ones who need to help shift the direction of this "wave of the future."

As the FA continues working on distance education issues this summer as we look ahead to our next contract negotiations, please join us! Contact me, and I'll add your name to the list.