A recent article I came across made the case for retaining some of the digital teaching practices that emerged during the pandemic. It was a sensible, well-argued piece — advocating for lecture recordings, virtual consultations, and online forums as tools that offer students greater flexibility and support.

And while I agree with much of that logic, I couldn’t help but feel it fell short of what’s needed right now.

Framing digital education around what we can keep risks reducing it to a matter of convenience and continuity. But the question we should be asking isn’t “how do we preserve what worked?” — it’s “how can digital teaching help us reimagine what higher education can be?”

The digital tools that sustained teaching during lockdown — lecture capture, forums, online drop-ins — are now well-established. They’ve earned their place. But they’re also the lowest common denominator of digital practice. They were survival strategies, not transformative ones.

If we remain in this mode — adding digital polish to pre-pandemic pedagogy — we squander a much bigger opportunity. Digital teaching, when designed with intention, can do so much more than just replicate old models. It can empower students as co-creators of knowledge, foster genuine collaboration, and support new ways of thinking, reflecting, and assessing.

One of the most important shifts digital learning enables is the redistribution of agency. It challenges the “sage on the stage” model. It creates space for peer learning, for asynchronous dialogue, and for knowledge construction that’s situated, multimodal, and messy in all the right ways.

During the pandemic, I saw educators experiment boldly. They replaced exams with authentic assessments. They ran asynchronous debates that drew in more voices than ever would have spoken in a lecture theatre. They used digital platforms not to replicate teaching, but to rethink it. And yet, as we’ve moved back to “normal,” so much of that energy has been lost — quietly pushed aside by resurgent timetables and legacy structures.

That’s the real risk here: not that we abandon digital tools, but that we reduce them to sidekicks in a story that’s still being led by outdated models of content delivery and summative assessment.

We need more than retention. We need vision. And we need the institutional will to ask harder questions — about equity, access, belonging, and the kind of futures we’re preparing students for.

So yes, let’s keep what worked. But let’s not confuse that with ambition. Because digital teaching doesn’t just deserve a place in the system — it deserves to help reshape the system itself.