The Manifesto for Teaching Online

The Manifesto for Teaching Online

The Manifesto for Teaching Online

Siân Bayne, Peter Evans, Rory Ewins, Jeremy Knox, James Lamb, Hamish Macleod, Clara O’Shea, Jen Ross, Philippa Sheail, and Christine Sinclair

Illustrated by Kirsty Johnston

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in ITC Stone and Avenir by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bayne, Siân, author.

Title: The manifesto for teaching online / Siân Bayne, Peter Evans, Rory Ewins, Jeremy Knox, James Lamb, Hamish Macleod, Clara O'Shea, Jen Ross, Philippa Sheail, Christine Sinclair ; illustrated by Kirsty Johnston.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020002988 | ISBN 9780262539838 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Internet in higher education. | Web-based instruction. | Education, Higher—Computer-assisted instruction.

Classification: LCC LB2395.7 .B39 2020 | DDC 378.1/7344678—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002988

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d_r0

This book is dedicated to all the students on the Edinburgh MSc in Digital Education past, present, and future: thank you for all your boldness, generosity, insight and trust.

Contents

The 2016 Manifesto for Teaching Online

Introduction: We Are the Campus

I Politics and Instrumental Logics

Introduction

1 There Are Many Ways to Get It Right Online. Best Practice Neglects Context.

2 We Should Attend to the Materialities of Digital Education. The Social Isn’t the Whole Story.

3 Online Teaching Need Not Be Complicit with the Instrumentalization of Education.

4 Online Teaching Should Not Be Downgraded to Facilitation.

5 Can We Stop Talking about Digital Natives?

Conclusion: Valuing Complexity, Valuing the Teacher

II Beyond Words

Introduction

6 Text Has Been Troubled: Many Modes Matter in Representing Academic Knowledge.

7 Aesthetics Matter: Interface Design Shapes Learning.

8 Remixing Digital Content Redefines Authorship.

9 Assessment Is an Act of Interpretation, Not Just Measurement.

10 A Digital Assignment Can Live On. It Can Be Iterative, Public, Risky, and Multivoiced.

Conclusion: Beyond Words, Beyond the Author

III Recoding Education

Introduction

11 Openness Is Neither Neutral nor Natural: It Creates and Depends on Closures.

12 Massiveness Is More Than Learning at Scale: It Also Brings Complexity and Diversity.

13 Algorithms and Analytics Recode Education: Pay Attention!

14 Automation Need Not Impoverish Education: We Welcome Our New Robot Colleagues.

Conclusion: The Politics of Technical Disruptions

IV Face, Space, and Place

Introduction

15 Online Can Be the Privileged Mode. Distance Is a Positive Principle, Not a Deficit.

16 Contact Works in Multiple Ways. Face Time Is Overvalued; Digital Education Reshapes Its Subjects. The Possibility of the Online Version Is Overstated.

17 Place Is Differently, Not Less, Important Online.

18 Distance Is Temporal, Affective, Political: Not Simply Spatial.

Conclusion: Beyond the Deficit Model

V Surveillance and (Dis)trust

Introduction

19 Online Courses Are Prone to Cultures of Surveillance. Visibility Is a Pedagogical and Ethical Issue.

20 A Routine of Plagiarism Detection Structures-In Distrust.

Conclusion: Strategies of Future Making

Conclusion

References

Index

The 2016 Manifesto for Teaching Online

Online can be the privileged mode. Distance is a positive principle, not a deficit.

Place is differently, not less, important online.

Text has been troubled: many modes matter in representing academic knowledge.

We should attend to the materialities of digital education. The social isn’t the whole story.

Openness is neither neutral nor natural: it creates and depends on closures.

Can we stop talking about digital natives?

Digital education reshapes its subjects. The possibility of the online version is overstated.

There are many ways to get it right online. Best practice neglects context.

Distance is temporal, affective, political: not simply spatial.

Aesthetics matter: interface design shapes learning.

Massiveness is more than learning at scale: it also brings complexity and diversity.

Online teaching need not be complicit with the instrumentalization of education.

A digital assignment can live on. It can be iterative, public, risky, and multivoiced.

Remixing digital content redefines authorship.

Contact works in multiple ways. Face time is overvalued.

Online teaching should not be downgraded to facilitation.

Assessment is an act of interpretation, not just measurement.

Algorithms and analytics recode education: pay attention!

A routine of plagiarism detection structures-in distrust.

Online courses are prone to cultures of surveillance. Visibility is a pedagogical and ethical issue.

Automation need not impoverish education: we welcome our new robot colleagues.

Don’t succumb to campus envy: we are the campus.

Introduction: We Are the Campus

[A manifesto makes] explicit (that is, manifest) a subtle but radical transformation in the definition of what it means to progress, that is, to process forward and meet new prospects. Not as a war cry for an avant-garde to move even further and faster ahead, but rather as a warning, a call to attention, so as to stop going further in the same way as before toward the future.

(Latour 2010, 473)

Teaching as a team is common in higher education, and perhaps works particularly well in programs strongly driven by the research of those doing the teaching. Students and teachers benefit from bringing multiple, entangled perspectives to the task of making sense of the world, where those perspectives are informed and energized by good research and scholarship. However, it is relatively rare for large teaching teams to come together to define and agree on a shared political and pedagogical stance on the act of teaching. Reaching such an agreement takes a lot of time, commitment, creativity, negotiation, and open dialogue among people who do not always entirely agree with each other’s stance and methods even though they share a mutual respect.

Figure 0.1

The Manifesto for Teaching Online emerged from this context of team teaching and negotiation. Its authors are all researchers at the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh, and we are all teachers on the fully online master’s program in digital education, offered by the School of Education since 2006. We first published the manifesto in its original postcard form in 2011, then again in 2016, with a third iteration planned for 2021—a five-year rhythm that seems likely to continue into the foreseeable future. Five years is a long time in all academic fields, but particularly those that navigate the continually shifting landscape of technological change. And while our values as teachers and researchers in digital education may not shift that much, the context in which we apply them changes substantially year by year.

Figure 0.2 The 2011 manifesto

The manifesto emerged from a small research project, conducted between 2009 and 2011, that was funded to interrogate the online assessment and feedback methods we had developed in our program and to extend and share these with other educators. Over more than a year of intense discussion among the teaching team and work with the students who were appointed as research associates to the project, we found that we had done important work in formulating and articulating a shared teaching philosophy capable of driving such a project. Sharing this with others seemed to require a more experimental and engaged approach than the usual research papers and blog articles. A rough draft of the first Manifesto for Teaching Online was written and then refined over a series of discussions and events among a wider group of students and colleagues. By 2011 we had finalized the text and worked with a designer (Oliver Brookes) on the first print version. Over the course of 2015, an expanded team of teachers on our master’s program (the authors of this book) revisited and reassembled the manifesto into its 2016 version, which Oliver Brookes then redesigned.

Figure 0.3 The 2016 manifesto

The aim of the manifesto was partly to develop our own teaching by articulating our shared values and their political and philosophical basis. Its theme was our practice, but it was also a way of describing and building on our research. Its critical goal was to push back on two linked areas we saw, and continue to see, as damaging: (1) the impoverished technocorporate futures for education being normalized by corporate and government ed-tech and (2) the orthodoxies framing traditional higher education teaching, which so often fail to properly account for digital methods.

In relation to the first of these, we wanted to find ways of resisting the instrumentalizing, ethically lax ways in which ed-tech tends to be described in the industry, political, and management spheres, a discourse focusing on technology as an inevitable solution to the problems surrounding education and educators. Here, techno-instrumentalism drives visions of a future defined by the values of corporate interest, efficiency, and productivity, rarely taking into account the values and experience of teachers and students themselves. In relation to the second, we wanted to push against the routine privileging of on-campus teaching in universities and the structural downgrading of online methods that cascade from this. We wanted to emphasize that being online opens up new, creative, highly engaged ways of teaching that deserve to be valued on their own terms. It is this point that underlies one of the key statements of the manifesto itself:

Don’t succumb to campus envy: we are the campus.

During the proofing stage of this book, the COVID-19 crisis hit. Within weeks universities around the globe radically reshaped their teaching methods as on-campus students returned home, university staff locked up their offices, and communities locked down. In our own university, as in many others, all teaching shifted online within days and longer-term planning for the coming academic year became focused on how to continue to teach—and recruit—without guaranteed access to our campus teaching spaces. In this changed world, every faculty member became an online teacher, every student became a distance learner, and the very survival of some universities became entangled with their ability to manage the digital pivot.

It will be a while before we are able to fully understand how this shift has affected educational institutions, professionals, and students long term. However, in this new world, in which fully digital teaching methods leapt from the margins to the mainstream in days, we found that the manifesto not only held up but became even more necessary, particularly in its resistance to instrumental logics and its call to be bold and critical when approaching the digital. That said, some of its meanings did shift when refracted by the lens of the pandemic. We are the campus was previously a call from the margins by students and teachers working in geospatially distanced networks. During the global COVID-19 lockdown it became a description of the operational mode of the majority.

One of the key manifesto points that became particularly resonant was perhaps this one: Online can be the privileged mode. Distance is a positive principle, not a deficit. Many of us, at the time of writing this passage, do not feel distance to be a positive principle. We miss our campuses, our offices, being co-present with our students and colleagues. We are worn out by the glitchy intensity of video meetings, by the long days on email, and by the loss of the handshake, the casual conversation, the closeness. However, we have also seen that networked distance has enabled us to build new proximities that seem likely to persist even when campuses reopen. Post-COVID there is likely to be a willingness to understand that teaching online can be creative, experimental, and connected in new and productive ways beyond the instrumental needs must. While it of course creates new exclusions, we have seen that freedom from the requirement for physical and temporal co-presence can work to the benefit of many, much of the time. When distance once again becomes a question of choice, not a necessity, we will collectively be in a better and more informed position to understand it as a positive principle in many contexts.

This issue of context is a vital one and is embedded across the manifesto. We do not make unifying and totalizing claims around best practice but argue consistently that context drives our institutional and individual choices. Post-pandemic—and still having to plan for other profound crises affecting mobility such as climate change, political instability, and the likelihood of future public health crises—our context will be one in which individuals and institutions will need to do some bold thinking in relation to resilience, access, teaching quality, and inclusion. The common assumption that online is second best in all contexts will not hold.

Why a Manifesto?

Committing to the production of a manifesto gave us a chance to work beyond the boundaries of the formalized and institutionalized modes of writing with which we are most familiar as academics: the academic paper or monograph, the quality assurance report, the outcomes-oriented course document. It forced us to work intensively as a team, over the period of a year in the first instance, to agree on the core points of our shared teaching philosophy and then formulate these in a way that was succinct, provocative, and engaging. As an exercise in reaching a shared understanding of what constitutes teaching quality, it surpassed to a significant degree the formalized and routinized institutional processes of quality assurance, allowing us to develop our thinking alongside our students, colleagues in other areas of the university, and a global public. It enabled us to tighten the links between our teaching and our research in a light-touch, agile way that catalyzed the academic literature in the interests of formulating and describing our practice.

The manifesto has been opened up to a global public from the start. It has been extensively blogged, remixed, reinterpreted, annotated, tweeted, contested, critiqued, keynoted, and used by colleagues across the globe who are thinking seriously about the practice of teaching in digital contexts, however it is interpreted. We have seen the manifesto postcard displayed on the walls of academic offices around the world. There are now two postcard designs, two videos (Lamb 2013, 2017), several academic papers, and translations into Chinese, Spanish, and Croatian. The Manifesto for Teaching Online is distinctive among academic manifestos in that it is not only written; it is also, in its postcard, video, and now book forms, designed. This perhaps accounts for some of its appeal and its openness to commentary and remix. What we have not produced to date, however, is an extended text that explicitly links the abbreviated, punchy statements of the manifesto to the large body of research and practice from which it emerges. That is the purpose of this book.

As a team, we see this text not so much as a book about the manifesto but as an extended manifesto in itself. Its aims are the same as those of the manifesto in its postcard and video formats: it is a call to attention, a point of pause, a distillation of a research program, and a statement of teaching values. In line with the quotation from Latour’s (2010) An Attempt at a Compositionist Manifesto, which opens this introduction, it argues not for further and faster movement into a promised future. Colonization and acceleration have not, in general, proved positive models for education. Rather, it asks us to reconsider what it means to progress, to stop going further in the same way as before, to take time to think differently. Latour refers to this as a subtle but radical transformation in the definition of what it means to progress, suggesting that we need to rethink the conventional purpose of the manifesto as an antireactionary, revolutionary call to arms by an avant-garde committed to the ideal of progress.

Our manifesto never set out to be