Afterword: Contending With COVID-19 and Beyond: The 5Cs of Educational Evolution

Abstract

Unexpected developments in an environment often drive the evolutionary process. This is as true for the evolution of societies as it is for species. The effective evolution of education will involve knowing what the key adaptation factors are and making them central to how educators respond to shifts in socio-pedagogical environments on local, regional, and global levels. Five factors seem central to addressing evolutionary change in higher education—particularly in relation to online environments. Understanding these 5C factors will be essential to educational success in today’s COVID-19 context and in adapting to future educational challenges that emerge.

Unexpected developments in an environment often drive the evolutionary process. This is as true for the evolution of societies and social practices as it is for species and physiological traits. Within this context, recent responses to the global COVID-19 pandemic represent perhaps the single greatest event to prompt the evolution of education worldwide. Seemingly overnight, an unprecedented number of universities, colleges, and schools found themselves shifting pedagogical practices and modes of educational delivery to online environments. These events can provide important insights into factors that shape the evolution of education.

Adaptive Responses

Although this global shift to online instruction did cause some chaos, educators worldwide were quick to come together to help each other with educational resources, online teaching practices, and a range of moral, technical, and pedagogical support structures. This crisis-driven movement was organic and led by educators who adapted in response to perhaps the greatest change in the educational environment the world has seen. The results have been a fundamental alteration—an evolutionary shift—in how educators around the globe will perceive and practice instruction in online contexts.

Through these events and experiences, educators worldwide have begun identifying the environmental factors to which they must adapt to survive in new pedagogical contexts. The responses, strategies, and technologies that emerged as drivers of this evolutionary process can help us anticipate future shifts that could prompt the next round of mass educational change. Effective evolution will involve knowing what the key adaptation factors are and making them central to how educators respond to shifts in socio-pedagogical environments on local, regional, and global levels.

Aspects of Adaptation

Although events are still unfolding, certain factors seem central to addressing evolutionary change in higher education—particularly in relation to online environments. These “Five C Factors” are culture, connection, content, conveyance, and credibility, and they are all connected to, greatly affect, and are dependent upon adaptive approaches to online education. Understanding these 5C factors will be central to educational success in today’s COVID-19 context as well as in adapting to future educational challenges that emerge. These 5-C factors work as follows:

Culture: Foundational to evolutionary adaptation are the audiences involved in the educational process—who they are, their background, and their motivations for engaging in formal educational contexts. This group is not one block. Rather, the category of “students” increasingly encompasses various audiences with their own expectations and needs associated with formal education.

This factor of “culture” involves audiences other than students. Rather, the cultures to consider must also encompass the educators providing instruction in terms of who they are and their knowledge of and relationship to a topic. As a culture involved in educational contexts, educators need to be considered in terms of how they perceive their role in educational process and their responsibilities in relation to the classes they teach and the students with whom they interact.

For each culture, central aspects to consider are

Topic: What do individuals know about the topic of a class, why are they interested in it, and how do they approach it

Technique: How do individuals process, understand, and use information; how do they communicate about topics and connect them to their world

Technologies: What do individuals use to access information, share ideas, create materials, and engage in discussions, when, how, and with whom.

The overall questions to ask are “Who will be taking and who will be teaching this class?” “What do they know about this topic?” and “How will they approach ideas relating to this topic?” These factors are central to determining how a culture will respond to adaptations to evolve educational practices in the present and over time.

• 2. Connection: A second factor involves determining a culture’s connection to a topic, or that group’s objectives for interacting with and learning about ideas in educational contexts. No culture, be they students or teachers, engage in educational endeavors randomly. Rather, certain objectives drive their pursuits. These objectives and how they connect to topics are central to the ways cultures approach ideas, the methods they use for learning about concepts, and the practices they employ when applying information or conveying ideas to others.

This factor of connection, or the objective for interacting in educational environments, is often essential to how effectively cultures accept, adapt to, and adopt new approaches for teaching or learning about issues. Connection also influences the acceptance and use of technologies for engaging in educational endeavors. In sum, individuals need to answer the question “Why are individuals engaging with this topic in this educational context?” to adapt to evolve in ways that allow cultures to achieve their objectives associated with educational experiences.

3. Content: Once one knows who is engaged in education and what their objectives for engagement are, one can determine what information, or content, they expect to encounter in an educational context. By knowing the background and objectives of a group, one can identify what information to share in relation to that topic. One can also better determine how to share that content in ways each culture considers essential to achieving its objectives for interacting in educational spaces. This knowledge can help determine what concepts to cover, what approaches to use, and what technologies to employ (and how) to deliver this content so cultures can connect it to their educational objectives.

• 4. Conveyance: The fourth element to consider, conveyance, encompasses methods for delivering content so cultures can connect it to their educational objectives. Only after one knows who is engaging, why, and what they expect to engage about, can one assess methods for sharing information in educational spaces. The key is determining what content cultures need and how they need to interact with it in terms of connections. Once such factors are known, educators can determine options for conveying content to these audiences effectively.

In such situations, the focus should be on modes for sharing content in ways that help cultures connect it to their educational objectives. This process contrasts starkly with surveying technologies, selecting technical options, and then trying to determine how to use these technologies for educational objectives later. By focusing on how to convey content versus what can be used to convey it, individuals avoid the trap of letting technology drive pedagogy. This shift in perspective allows educators to focus on establishing exchanges that foster meaningful connections to help cultures effectively connect content to their educational objectives. This conveyance-focused approach can reveal how lower-tech options (e.g., using mobile phone calls vs. video conferencing tools) might be the best options for instruction. They could also indicate that seemingly counterintuitive methods (e.g., asynchronous text exchanges vs. synchronous video chats) are more effective options for meaningful educational exchanges.

5. Credibility: Selecting the pedagogical methods, delivery options, and technological mechanisms for addressing evolutionary forces is a matter of credibility. Cultures will only use options they consider “credible,” or worth engaging with. The technology itself is irrelevant; it is the approach to educational interaction that fosters trust in and the credibility of educational approaches. Establishing credibility involves reviewing the options identified in the prior 4C categories and considering how to address each to foster credibility among the cultures connecting with content in educational spaces.

One cannot assess the credibility of an educational approach until the information from the first 4C categories is reviewed. Yet this final assessment for credibility is essential to determining if an evolutionary option will be effective and worth pursuing. Such an evaluation is also essential to determining if modifications to an option are needed or if a completely new approach is essential to educational success. This review for credibility, moreover, needs to involve all the cultures who will partake in educational exchanges, as only addressing one culture (e.g., students) and not another (e.g., instructors) will limit the resulting approach. Such limitations could lead to discontent with an adaptation and result in a failure to address evolutionary moments in education.

These five factors have been central to the perspectives, pedagogies, and practices technical communication educators world-wide are using to address the current COVID-19 context and transition to online teaching practices. They are all also central to the success of current and future students and have shaped the evolution of education in times of massive social change. The better educators understand how these 5C factors influence education, the more successfully they can adapt their processes to evolve in concert with social changes versus clash with them.

Anticipating Adaptation

These 5C elements have been central to educational practices since the first teacher attempted to impart instruction to the original student. They have not changed over time; rather, the nature of how one addresses them has. By using the 5Cs framework to examine the educational environments of today and tomorrow, educators can adapt to new challenges and address unexpected changes. Doing so will allow them to provide an ever-changing base of students with pedagogies that adapt effectively to the evolutionary forces of a time.