Chapter 1: Embracing New Norms with Asynchronous Online Learning

Abstract

The pandemic ushers in a ‘new normal’, in which digitisation enforces ways of working and learning. The education industry is being forced into technologisation, a well underway development fuelled by commercialism and the reigning market ideology. In his book, Daniel (2020, p. 1) highlighted that “many institutions had plans to make greater use of technology in teaching, but the outbreak of COVID-19 has meant that changes intended to occur over months or years had to be implemented in a few days”. Digital technologies and economic rationality based on performance are significant determinants of the commercialisation of learning. Moving from face-to-face physical presence to virtual contact (synchronous and asynchronous), the learning space becomes disembodied, virtual, not actual, impacting both student learning and the organisation of schools, which are no longer buildings but websites. Such change is not only coterminous with the pandemic, as the Education 2030 Agenda (UNESCO, 2015b) testified; preceding that was the Delors Report (Delors, 1996), which recorded education as lifelong learning that included learning to know, learning to do, learning to be, and learning to live together.