After a challenging and unique year of emergency remote learning, I recently spoke with a group of faculty members new to online teaching to learn more about their experiences. While no two educators ever face identical challenges, I heard the same refrains over and over.

The first won’t come as a surprise to anyone: The shift to online courses last spring was nothing short of a perfect storm. But what’s more concerning is what these educators said next: Over the past year, remote higher ed didn’t get much better.

That should give us all pause. Is the prevailing takeaway from this brutal, oppressive year a shared aversion toward online learning?

If so, we’ve failed our students—not to mention the future of higher education.

That might be a contentious point, so it’s important to note at the outset just how hard conditions have been this year. Particularly at the many institutions that had not previously offered online courses, instructors lacked the preparation time, resources or instructional design expertise required to develop and build an online curriculum—not to mention the infrastructure required to support their efforts at scale.

For faculty members who had not received professional development in online teaching, it felt just as stressful as if they had been suddenly forced to teach in a foreign language. The need to manage a single digitized space for teaching and learning often evolved into a shell game as they tried to bet on which moving part would contribute to an optimal learning experience, with limited support. The tangled web of grading, posting assignments, and communicating with students—plus maintaining an engaging and supportive instructor presence, much less high academic standards—often turned confusion into chaos.

As a result, educators faced massive changes in an extremely compressed time frame, leaving little or no opportunity to process or develop coping strategies for themselves and their students. Although institutions have been quick to respond and provide a variety of support systems to cope with stress, there is no one method serving as an effective “one size fits all.” That’s led to faculty burnout, and has left many desperate to go back to normal.

But the higher education community also knows that old “normal” may not exist anymore. Remote learning is here to stay. And if the main takeaway from the past year is memories of how poorly it went, we have no hope of setting ourselves up for success in the future.

Read the full article about online learning by Kathleen Ives at EdSurge.