In 2020 the Covid-19 lockdown saw all South African schools that had sufficient connectivity and resources turn to online teaching in a bid to mitigate learning losses that would arise from not attending school.

This move online, of course, was only possible for students who had access to connectivity and devices. The huge inequality in South Africa meant that many students were unable to benefit from online teaching, such as it was.

One of the developments from this enforced online education is the emergence of a number of online schools that seek to teach children using online learning platforms such as Google Classroom. The question on many minds is whether these online schools are in fact able to teach children and attain the same, or similar, outcomes to traditional face-to-face schools.

The question I want to address is not whether we should teach online but rather, how one can do so in a way that develops children cognitively.

Most of my research over the past decade has involved studying how information communication technologies (ICTs) can be used as tools to develop students’ thinking.

One central finding echoed in papers across the world is that it is not technology itself that develops children, but rather how this technology is used as a teaching/learning tool. Technology itself is neither good nor bad; useful or useless. It is only how we use and harness technology that can make the tool effective or not.

The question I want to address here is not whether we should teach online, then, but rather, how we should teach online in a manner that can develop students.

It is important to make a distinction between teaching with and teaching through technology. In a traditional classroom, the teacher teaches with technology; that is, they may use a whiteboard to demonstrate the solution to a maths problem. In this instance the teacher is teaching with technology, using it as a tool to assist them in guiding students’ knowledge acquisition.

Teaching through technology, however, is a different matter. In this circumstance, there is no “live” teacher manipulating technology. Rather, what we have is a learning management system populated with, say, documents or problems that the child must navigate in the absence of an actual teacher.

I have been asked whether it is possible for children to learn in the absence of a face-to-face teacher/student engagement. The answer to this question is: it depends on how the interface is set up.

There are ways to design an online environment that can make it function as if a real teacher is there and indeed, with artificial intelligence, there are ways to programme bots to assist students, where the bots continue to learn as children engage with them.

So, how can we design online schools that can develop our students cognitively? The first thing to understand is how students acquire knowledge and consequently, how they need to be taught.

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Research indicates that for children to learn, several factors need to be in place:

1. They need to be challenged. That is, they need to be given work that is slightly outside of their ability to engage with without help. This causes cognitive conflict, or a disjuncture in the child’s thinking which leads the child to seek assistance and thereby solve the problem;
2. Dialogical interaction has been shown in over 50 years of research to be a more effective way to learn than learning in isolation. Two heads, it seems, really are better than one when it comes to cognitive development. So, one would need to have an online classroom that allows for dialogue between students as peers and between the student and the teacher;
3. The environment would have to motivate the student to engage meaningfully with it. Research indicates that gamification, where the concepts being taught are part of an online game, has a positive impact on learning;
4. The abstract concepts that are being taught must be related to the student’s everyday concepts. If a student is going to understand something, as opposed to merely memorise it, they need to ‘own’ this concept in some way. Linking abstraction to what they already know is one way of achieving this;
5. Related to the linking of the abstract and the every day is the use of authentic, real-life problems that the student must solve online. For example, South Africa has a challenge in relation to electricity. How can we set problems in our teaching that speak to solving this real-life problem;
6.  Assessments must follow teaching but not as an endpoint of the teaching. Assessments can be viewed as a midpoint in teaching. First, one teaches the concept, then one tests for acquisition and then one teaches what is not known. I have called this the teach-assess-teach model of teaching/learning; and
7. Evaluation must be explicit and show the student where they went wrong and why they did so.

It is not sufficient to merely provide a “right” or “wrong” answer, the student needs to be aware of how and why they were right or wrong.

Can all of this be done online? In my opinion, yes. There will be those who say that humans are a social species and require face-to-face interaction for development to occur. This is true, of course.

But Zoom and Teams allow for a form of social interaction that, while currently not optimal, does provide space for dialogue. Most of the online games that children play allow for discussion and dialogue where two or more children can work together to build a house or achieve a task.

My suggestion here is not that no face-to-face interaction happens in future; this is disingenuous and fails to appreciate the social fabric of our species.

However, I do see the possibility of online schooling being completely online. But this requires a shift from what we currently view as schooling to a novel, 21st-century approach to schooling where technology provides the conduit through which novel knowledge is acquired.

We will need to train teachers not only to be able to use technology effectively but also to understand the cognitive principles of development underpinning students’ engagement with the online realm.

Promoting self-regulation early in life so that children can regulate their problem-solving actions themselves rather than depending on a teacher to do so is also necessary in an online realm.

The impetus behind this article relates to whether online schooling is possible and if so, how it is possible. In my opinion, we will have to find a way to make online schooling possible. We live in a century where children are embedded in technology. In this new century, we need to know how to harness technology to benefit schooling. We need to look to the online school in charting the way forward for schooling.

However, a brief caveat.

Online schooling in a country as unequal as South Africa is an issue for social justice advocates to address. Most school-going children do not own their own devices, connectivity, or sufficient funds to buy data.

If we are going to take online schooling seriously as an educational benefit, then we have to ensure that all our students have equal access to it. DM