ABSTRACT
An increase in online and hybrid education during and after the Covid-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated the infiltration of digital media into mainstream university teaching. Global challenges, such as ecological crises, call for further radical changes in university teaching, requiring an even richer convergence of 'natural,' 'human' and 'digital'. In this paper, we argue that this convergence demands us to go beyond 'the great online transition' and reframe how we think about university, teachers' roles and their competencies to use digital technologies. We focus on what it takes to be a teacher in a sustainable university and consider emerging trends at three levels of the educational ecosystem-global developments (macro), teachers' local practices (meso), and daily activities (micro). Through discussion of examples of ecopedagogies and pedagogies of care and self-care, we argue that teaching requires a fluency to embrace different ways of knowing and collective awareness of how the digital is entwined with human practices within and across different levels of the educational ecosystem. For this, there is a need to move beyond person-centric theorisations of teacher digital competencies towards more holistic, ecological conceptualisations. It also requires going beyond functionalist views of teachers' roles towards enabling their agentive engagement with a future-oriented, sustainable university mission.
ABSTRACT
An increase in online and hybrid education during and after the Covid-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated the infiltration of digital media into mainstream university teaching. Global challenges, such as ecological crises, call for further radical changes in university teaching, requiring an even richer convergence of ‘natural,' ‘human' and ‘digital'. In this paper, we argue that this convergence demands us to go beyond ‘the great online transition' and reframe how we think about university, teachers' roles and their competencies to use digital technologies. We focus on what it takes to be a teacher in a sustainable university and consider emerging trends at three levels of the educational ecosystem—global developments (macro), teachers' local practices (meso), and daily activities (micro). Through discussion of examples of ecopedagogies and pedagogies of care and self-care, we argue that teaching requires a fluency to embrace different ways of knowing and collective awareness of how the digital is entwined with human practices within and across different levels of the educational ecosystem. For this, there is a need to move beyond person-centric theorisations of teacher digital competencies towards more holistic, ecological conceptualisations. It also requires going beyond functionalist views of teachers' roles towards enabling their agentive engagement with a future-oriented, sustainable university mission.
ABSTRACT
This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration of The Manifesto for Teaching Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2020 Manifesto continues in the same critically provocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrates, its publication could not be timelier. Though the Manifesto was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the responses gathered here inevitably reflect on the experiences of moving to digital, distant, online teaching under unprecedented conditions. As these contributions reveal, the challenges were many and varied, ranging from the positive, breakthrough opportunities that digital learning offered to many students, including the disabled, to the problematic, such as poor digital networks and access, and simple digital poverty. Regardless of the nature of each response, taken together, what they show is that The Manifesto for Teaching Online offers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching.