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Let us forget equal, and here is why! Remember high school geometry class? We all knew that a circle and a square were not equal, but in geometry class we found out that these two different shapes could be considered equivalent if they had the same area.
During the preparation for this issue of the Distance Learning, the fields of instructional technology and distance education have been in the midst of a time crisis-a crisis brought on by a health pandemic that required most, nearly all, education and training organizations to stop face-toface instruction and initiate a new form of education-remote teaching. Remote teaching can be described as the rapid, generally unplanned, and even chaotic separation of teachers and students from one another by requiring all involved in the education process to teach or learn remotely. Remote usually means teaching from the instructor's home and learning from the student's home. Words such as immediate, unplanned, chaotic, difficult, ineffective, and challenging have often been used to describe the start of remote teaching. Gradually, remote teaching began to be characterized as working, if poorly, as okay, if not excellent, and certainly a second choice. And, during this process of coping by teachers, trainers, professors, and learners, the field of distance education became synonymous to remote teaching-to the detriment of distance education.
Several questions should come to mind as professionals in distance education attempt to determine the impact of this time of crisis on the field. First, what is actually happening in schools, training organizations, and colleges? Several studies are in progress that document the events related to distance education in the crisis situation. These studies will be reported on in Distance Learning.
Second, what in the distance education literature could be applied to improve remote teaching? Last, why were education and training organizations so seemingly unprepared? This last question is sure to be written about and discussed for years.
One decades-old idea seems relevant to how remote teaching can quickly be...