In 2020, largely as a result of the world pandemic, technology is playing an unprecedented role in education and simultaneously revealing vast inequities in access to technology for learning in public schools in the United States. The disparity is seen not only in the public school system but in public and private universities.

At my own university, several occupational therapy graduate students were perilously close to mental, physical, and spiritual breakdown as the pandemic bore down on the community. They struggled to care for children, deal with loss of jobs and income, and confronting their own vulnerabilities to the illness. Meanwhile they also had to confront the inadequacy of their devices, difficulty with access to internet, learning new technologies like Zoom, and navigating the social isolation from their learning peers, families, and friends as a result of the quarantine. As a faculty member, it was numbing to see how difficult the transition was proving for the institution, faculty, staff, and students.

Now we are all bootstrapped experts in using video/audio technologies as an affordance in learning. We are digitally transformed (Dx). However, significant financial input by learning institutions and a desire by faculty to become adept in instructional technology and pedagogy for online learning are deep needs, not to mention ensuring all students have more than adequate technology resources to participate in eLearning. And we are not talking about simply recapitulating the face to face lecture classroom. The affordances of technology make it possible to let students construct their own learning products, and thus demonstrate knowledge more deeply than performance on a test or term paper.

Consider the Wiki, a tool I am using via the learning management system of Blackboard, in an applied occupational therapy course on neurological conditions. The Wiki allows the graduate students to co-construct knowledge in answering a clinical question: using a combination of text explanations, citations, graphics, photos, videos, and links to internet resources. I do not have to lecture to students, I merely have to set the conditions for them to be liberated to direct their own learning: to be multi-modal. I have been very impressed at the products of their learning, especially as they have become more confident in interpreting sources and authoring their own statement on matters. They have become knowledgeable and are demonstrating emerging competence. Hopefully, as an additional benefit, the synchronous and asynchronous possibilities of the learning tool increases interaction and decreases the sense of isolation.

For the benefit of the instructor, the Wiki is the great equalizer in showing the exact contributions of all students across multiple versions of the products and grading student effort is accordingly simplified.