Digital learning has evolved significantly over the past few decades, shaped by virtual learning environments, the rise of open, networked technologies and, more recently, the emergence of AI. In this piece, Prof. John Traxler examines the divide between the quality-assured environments of formal education and the more open and less structured world of informal digital learning. He highlights both the challenge and opportunity to develop a balanced space between the extremes, one that requires learners to develop key skills such as criticality, curation, metacognition and reflection, and raises questions about responsibility and opportunity.
Closing the Gap Between Formal and Informal Digital Learning
Author: Prof. John Traxler, UNESCO Chair, Commonwealth of Learning Chair and Academic Director of the Avallain Lab
St. Gallen, March 30, 2026 – This piece is based largely on experience, research, writing and analysis of education beyond compulsory schooling (typically from age 16), mostly in the UK, Western Europe and similar international education systems; other sectors and other countries will have their own versions, but are still driven by underlying social, financial, technical and political factors, albeit differently across contexts. The piece aims to present a different perspective on digital learning from the more conventional one and, in doing so, may, in a relatively small space, simplify and generalise; but it is the perspective that matters, and the challenge and opportunity it represents.
The Dawn of Digital Learning
Many years ago, probably for the course of the decade straddling the turn of the century, if learners wanted to access digital educational resources and opportunities, they could only do so as students of some kind of formal education from an established education provider. The World Wide Web existed and was populated by institutions, corporations and organisations, often using the emerging technology of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), aka Learning Management System (LMS), such as Blackboard, WebCT or the open-source Moodle. This was their only access, which meant the institution could define what was learnt, how it was to be learnt and what behaviour was acceptable; the institution controlled the hardware, software and infrastructure.
Pedagogies, Espoused and Enacted
Interestingly, the rapid emergence of digital learning technologies and the expansion of higher education led to the professionalisation of teaching, no longer an essentially amateur activity by researchers in elite universities. It also led to the increased visibility of teaching, no longer confined to the privacy of the face-to-face seminar room. Not only was there the expectation that academics would learn to teach and be certified once they had, but the theorising of teaching should become much more explicit, no longer intuitive but conceptualised.
In particular, the component technologies of the VLE, such as the chat and webinar functions, were portrayed as vehicles for social constructive pedagogies, in which learners would interact and engage with each other, and for constructivist pedagogies, in which individualised learning would build on individual understandings. Gone were the days of learners being given content to absorb and retain; instead, their understanding was built on and was valued. Lecturers, it was proposed, would mutate from ‘the sage on the stage’ to the ‘guide by your side’, taking on a more facilitative role rather than acting as the primary source of knowledge.
The VLE did ensure consistency and efficiency; it seemed to allow teaching to be visible and thus monitored, and different lecturers to be swapped into and out of courses according to staffing; it also encouraged the expansion of distance learning, but this in fact offered little competitive advantage since every institution had the same idea and global markets already had global players.
Many years ago, I remarked to South African colleagues that making students use a VLE was like making them wear a school uniform. The reaction was, ‘What’s wrong with a school uniform?’ So, yes, I understood the need for consistency, equity, stability and quality assurance, but it is not adequate preparation for fashion choices, dress codes and expressing individuality through adult clothing. In other words, structured systems ensure fairness, but not independence.
Unfortunately, institutional digital learning meant that educational change and its institutional processes were now interlocked with IT change and its institutional processes. This meant that slow change became slower as decision-making became more complex. This logjam would be further exacerbated if ‘estates’, the departments managing, commissioning, renovating and remodelling teaching spaces, were also involved, requiring additional consultation and approval.
Twenty or thirty years later, inspection of many VLEs would reveal that they are still used mostly as repositories for notes and slide decks, for assessment hand-in alerts and for the digital submission of assessments, partly necessitated by the need for plagiarism detection.
In short, the pedagogies intended were not the pedagogies being enacted.
The Industrialisation of Education
Educational institutions were, however, driven by wider societal, financial and political pressures, not just educational or technological factors or fashions.
From a political and financial perspective, there was less public money, as a consequence of the 2008 global financial crisis (‘subprime mortgages’, remember those?). There was also less commitment to a vision of publicly funded education as some vague liberal public good, and instead a shift towards viewing it as a mechanism among competing free-market providers to put more and more trained graduates straight into jobs, leading to enormous pressures to increase throughput, maintain cost-efficiency and ensure consistency.
Faced with these kinds of pressures, digital learning could save the day, and in effect, education became electrified and industrialised, with increased throughput now based on a production line of rooms full of networked desktop computers.
What Changed?
What changed in the first decade of the current century was the emergence and growth, and then the universality and ubiquity of personal networked digital technologies, notably the mobile (smart) phone, with all its functions for capturing context and content, as well as tablets and laptops. Alongside this was the rise of web2.0 applications and social media in all its different forms, such as Facebook and WeChat. This also includes blogs, podcasts, video and image sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, as well as question-and-answer sites such as Reddit and Quora and information and knowledge sites such as Wikipedia and its offshoots.
All of these empowered users to upload their ideas, images, information and opinions, and to share, discuss, transform, merge, broadcast and discard them on a massive and unprecedented scale. In short, people and communities, not organisations and institutions, could manage, own and control their learning, adapted to whatever style they preferred, at whatever time and with whatever technology they preferred.
The New Knowledge Economy
In a sense, we are describing the transition from knowledge produced in a centralised top-down, centre-out web1.0 fashion from a small number of official producers, namely publishers, universities, ministries and broadcasters using a handful of broadcast technologies, to a flatter, peer-to-peer web 2.0 cottage industry of individuals and communities giving or bartering the knowledge they produce using or appropriating any technologies that are cheap, accessible and familiar.
It would be a mistake to portray this as democratisation of digital learning, given the ownership, control and politics of these technologies, but it is perhaps demotic. Nor should we assume that this is good or useful knowledge, only that there is a lot of it, some of it faulty, some of it harmful.
Nevertheless, the ‘locus of control’ seems to shift from clearly defined professional teachers to vaguely defined amateur learners.
The Chasm
So what we have is a chasm between the managed digital environments and contents of formal education, quality assured, professionally managed, and the anarchic and potentially dangerous chaos of informal digital learning. One critique of formal education might be the lack of preparation received by learners in making the transition from one to the other, from being taught, whatever exactly that might mean, to becoming competent, critical, lifelong learners. Another critique, given the sluggishness of education systems in recognising and responding to change in the outside world, is the threat to their credibility.
Tradition, Nothing More?
Perhaps, this is the wrong argument. In formal education, students wear gowns, write sit-down exams with a pen and learn from a VLE. It has nothing to do with employment skills; it is traditional, and the students collect a certificate if they do it all correctly, just a ‘rite de passage’, a rubber stamp. Perhaps students in education systems do not just learn what they are taught but something else, perhaps independence, socialisation and various other attributes described as maturity? That rather depends on their experiences within fragmented and unstable education systems.
Many years ago, at the dawn of mobile learning, a conference panel were asked, given this kind of analysis, what is now the role of universities? One answer from the panel was: ‘We give degrees.’ With increasing concern about student loans and the graduate premium, if any, this may not be such a great answer.
Why Does This Matter
It matters because education, or rather learning, matters and the chasm represents a challenge and an opportunity, one that can make or mar economic and social wellbeing for people and communities outside – or probably, inside – formal education. So now, a bigger challenge and opportunity is with us.
Of course, while many of the players in this discussion have been emerging over the past two decades, a new player suddenly appeared about three years ago, accessible conversational AI, generative artificial intelligence, mediated a chatbot on every laptop, tablet and phone. So we are obliged to ask whether this makes a qualitative difference to the argument or merely an enormous quantitative one. That may be a bigger question than can be addressed here and now, as we see AI haphazardly deployed in formal education and amongst informal learners, presumably changing what needs to be learnt in societies permeated by AI and how it could be learnt.
So, in the meantime, is there some third space, between the risky anarchy of the web and the managed conservatism of formal digital? And if there is such a third space, how does it represent a scalable and sustainable environment?
It is axiomatic that this informal digital learning that we describe rests on familiar, accessible and cheap technologies, both hardware and software, devices and networks, that give users control and confidence, ownership and autonomy. At first sight, there is no business model here; the system is self-sustaining and self-contained. There is, however, for both the individual and collective good, a need for support to nudge users towards efficient and benign learning and away from harmful and wasteful learning.
The Skills This Now Requires
Criticality would be a key skill, helping users tell good from bad, useful from useless, find the digital tools, content and communities that suit them, and help them question, enquire, scrutinise, and critique what they are getting, who they are getting it from and what choices they have.
Curation is another key skill, helping users find, evaluate, select, organise and classify the digital tools, content and communities that suit them. Finally, metacognition and reflection will help users understand and improve their own digital learning, digital ethics and digital relationships.
With some imagination, it should be possible for the edtech industry to develop and populate this third space, a permeable space between the resources of formal education and the freedoms of cyberspace, between the lucrative platforms of the one and the lucrative platforms of the other.
About Avallain
For more than two decades, Avallain has enabled publishers, institutions and educators to create and deliver world-class digital education products and programmes. Our award-winning solutions include Avallain Author, an AI-powered authoring tool, Avallain Magnet, a peerless LMS with integrated AI, and TeacherMatic, a ready-to-use AI toolkit created for and refined by educators.
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