Teachers Days 2022 - 27. April 2022

Wednesday, April 27^th, 2022

Lecture

The Manifesto for Teaching Online (2020) makes a number of claims about the value and potential of digital education. One of the most important is that "contact works in multiple ways. Face-time is over-valued". This talk is a deep dive into this claim, exploring current thinking and practice from online higher education contexts, and research into networked learning, virtual communities and post-digital education. It argues that meaningful, engaging and sustainable communities can be at the heart of digital education practice, but such communities do not emerge from attempts to copy ‘what works’ from a face-to-face setting. The nature of time and space, contact and interaction, and knowledge sharing is different in mediated settings, and designing for digital communities requires attention to those differences.

Workshop

We are the campus: the future of online communities

"Campus envy" is the tendency to see the university campus and face-to-face encounters on it as embodying the authentic university experience. This workshop is about what might happen if we don’t succumb to campus envy: instead using speculative and activity-centred methods to envisage distributed, accessible, and sustainable online learning communities, and designing approaches to help operationalise this. You will work collaboratively with colleagues to identify values and principles that can inform relational online teaching.

By the end of the workshop, you will be able to:

• identify specific features of your teaching context that have relevance for building rich online learning communities;
• consider the gains and losses involved in online community settings;
• plan for developing a community-centred approach to your online teaching.