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Now Is the Time to Make Online Schools Available to Everyone
Toward an inclusive remote education system
The spread of coronavirus in the United States has prompted thousands of schools and universities to shut down and move online, leading us to rethink the future of our education systems. A worldwide shutdown of schools at this rate and volume has been unprecedented, and now we can begin to imagine a possible dystopian future where similar shutdowns will become more commonplace due to climate change, pollution, or other pandemics. There’s no better time to talk about the need for an equitable, inclusive, global, and fully remote education system.
Remote education, or distance learning, was first introduced in the United States with the establishment of the U.S. Postal Service in the 1840s. “Instructional missives” were distributed via the postal service between students and professors through “commercial correspondence colleges.” Currently, there are 276 accredited online education programs recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.
One such online college is Columbia Southern University (CSU), where my mother has been a physics professor for nearly a decade. Despite the fact that CSU is an entirely online university, the faculty and students face technological challenges on a near-daily basis, such as issues with…
