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

Our manifesto celebrates multiple ways of teaching online. As this book pulls together aspects of the research that has shaped digital education over the past decade, it also works at times as an extended reflection on ten years of a specific teaching program, the master’s in digital education at the University of Edinburgh. This program asks students to work across and through a plethora of environments, modes, methods, and agents for teaching and learning. Environments include the traditional learning management system or virtual learning environment, discussion boards, blogging and microblogging, live chat events, video tutorials, virtual worlds, massive multiplayer games, shared documents for editing, shared spaces for playing with data, visualization apps, video, MOOCs, podcasts and many more. This abundance of digital environments is mirrored in a diversity of pedagogical approaches and teaching methods, including peer learning, tutoring one-to-one, problem-based learning, experiential learning, dialogue, multimodal assessment design, prototyping, dialogue, and games.

Furthermore, students—and this is common to many other online programs—come from across the United Kingdom and continental Europe, North and South America, Australia, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Almost all of our students are mid- (or later) career professionals—whether academics, learning technologists, consultants, teachers, or corporate learning and development practitioners. Our students bring with them their jobs and careers, families, troubles, networks, and knowledge, enriching the program and their peers with the complexity and pattern of their lives.

Reflecting the disciplinary multiplicities of digital education, the teaching team on this particular program themselves work from various backgrounds, including languages and literature, psychology, physics, political science, information sciences, cultural studies, sociology, and computer science. This disciplinary diversity is further enhanced by work with guest teachers from around the world, drawing on the open digital networks that the teaching team, colleagues, and students are engaged in.

Building on this rich complexity—the context of our work as teachers—we challenge the notion of teaching as being necessarily focused on preexisting “objects” of study, or on students as stable “learning” subjects. Rather, we understand teaching, learning, and assessment as emergent, performed through dynamic entanglements of both social and material components—people, objects, discourses, texts. These entanglements create multiple, coexisting realities of understanding (Law 2004). Teaching and learning are understood in this context as processes of assembling and gathering of people, digital technologies, curricula, work and study spaces, and artifacts of assessment (Fenwick and Edwards 2010), which both consolidate and resist existing relations of power (Boys 2016). For those of us authoring the manifesto, this perspective offers a way to open digital teaching to difference, making—through its multiplicity—space to challenge orthodoxies (such as “best practice”) that homogenize and reduce it.

This perspective on digital education takes us beyond transactional concerns with students’ ease of access to materials, expertise, or qualifications, toward understanding digital education as a collective, emergent, political endeavor achieved in specific contexts involving very different arrays of pedagogies, people, and technologies. Teaching involves navigating this complexity to enable autonomous thinking within the particular institutional contexts of formal education and within the particular educational processes of a specific program of study. Teaching is therefore enacted within specific networks and is situationally contingent and inherently multiple. With such a view, the very idea of a single, immutable best practice becomes untenable: online and offline, there are many ways to get it right.

Snapshot

Our MSc in digital education program uses many different digital environments to help students experience the possibilities and limitations of multiple platforms. For real-time discussion and debate, we have tried over the years to work within virtual environments that turn away from the flat spaces of videoconferencing environments, which tend to replicate classroom practice in their foregrounding of content and teacher over student participation. We have often chosen to use spaces that students can actively build and playfully inhabit in new ways that move beyond classroom metaphors.

One example was our use for many years of the virtual world of Linden Lab’s Second Life within a university-owned space we built called Holyrood Park. Here, teaching practices were made physical in circular seating patterns. There were no screens or blackboards; the space was designed and built to nurture discussion and playful representation of self through avatars (for more, see O’Shea and Dozier 2014; Sheail 2015). Many students enjoyed this virtual world as an immersive and fun space, in which learning could take place on beaches or around campfires and students could spend time together talking in gardens or platforms in the sky. However, a sizable number of students found this virtual world challenging and hard work: user interfaces were unintuitive, navigation opaque, and the act of building virtual objects and spaces complex and difficult. Sometimes avatars would not render correctly and behaved erratically, or nonstudents and occasional trolls would appear to disturb teaching sessions. What was a successful and engaging learning environment for some was clearly not for others. Ultimately we abandoned Second Life because the effects of this particular assemblage of people and practices was limiting the learning being achieved and students began to perceive the platform itself as outdated.

Our students now explore playful spatial configurations in digital education in Minecraft, the sandbox game and open world developed by Mojang and now owned by Microsoft. Minecraft is not a replacement for Second Life; rather, it is an alternative assemblage with a specific purpose: to function as an environment for students to build and develop new reflections on digital teaching space. The sociability of Second Life is to a large extent removed in this environment, though the ability for individual students to build and make is much enhanced, and students are able to visit one another’s work in a single digital landscape. Some students love this; others find it opaque to use and frustrating to craft.

For us, these two examples emphasize that teaching is a matter of continual negotiation and adaptation of the various configurations of technology, people, trends, learning aims, and dynamics available to us. The richness and variety of the choices of space open to us when we teach online emphasizes this, though it is of course also true for physically co-present teaching. We see good teaching and learning as an exercise in continual recrafting, not an adherence to entrenched notions of good practice. What works in Second Life will not in Minecraft, or in a physically embodied classroom, or in a WhatsApp discussion, or in a lab.

For us, education has the purpose of developing within students the techniques and aptitudes of critical reasoning within broader ethical frameworks that promote the common good. It involves exploring potential social and material reconfigurations of practices to generate ethical outcomes by including that which has been excluded or oppressed (van der Velden 2009), developing alternative, and we hope better, realities. The practices of critique within our own master’s in digital education involve recognizing and contesting common assumptions about the relations among educational institutions, staff, students, and digital technologies. In particular, we challenge the dominant framings of digital education that assume technology naturally empowers users to practice better learning, or necessarily enables institutions to create more effective or efficient ways of teaching (Bayne 2016). We argue that these instrumental framings consolidate existing relations of power (Boys 2016) and prevent us from building alternative futures for digital education that resist its instrumentalization. There are many ways to get it right online. “Best practice” neglects context.