It has historically been common to emphasize the importance of online facilitation skills over the subject expertise or other, more specialist aspects of teacher professionalism when discussing digital education. The common perception in the early years of digital education that it was a fundamentally limiting mode of learning led commentators and practitioners to emphasize the importance of the effective facilitation of group sociality and learning in a context of reduced social cues (for a good example of this, see Feenberg and Xin 2010). While facilitation is of course an important aspect of teaching, we argue in this manifesto that good online teaching is very much more than this. We propose that an overfocus on the facilitation of learning has formed part of an arsenal of discourses that make digital education complicit with teacher deprofessionalization (Bayne 2015b; Selwyn 2014) and the commodification and instrumentalization of education itself (Munro 2018).
Digital practices are often seen as part of a wider tendency in education over recent decades to emphasize learning at the expense of teaching. This trend, famously labeled by Biesta (2012) as “learnification,” emphasizes the role of the autonomous learner over the professionalism of the teacher. It constructs education as an individualized and transactional process and minimizes discussion of the wider structural purposes and problems of education as a system and project.
The assumption that the individual student is an autonomous learner with a preexisting, fully developed sense of individual agency and purpose leads to a shift in the perceived role of the teacher, who in “learnified” discourses is often demoted from professional, expert provider to supporter and conduit for the self-determining individual learner. Learners are assumed to be competent to navigate the complexities of learning in ways that best suit their needs and can be best supported by making subject and discipline knowledge-objects available as efficiently as possible. As Biesta (2005) has pointed out, however, “a major reason for engaging in education is precisely to find out what it is that one actually needs—a process in which educational professionals play a crucial role because a major part of their expertise lies precisely there” (59). As we discussed previously, the practice of teaching cannot be reduced to the transmission of stable knowledge-objects alone.
In the context of digital education, and where learning is emphasized over teaching, it is often assumed that subject knowledge is most efficiently delivered by video lecture, podcast, or text resource, with course design being standardized and outsourced to instructional designers or other para-academic roles. The primary role of the teacher then becomes to lubricate, or facilitate, the social and dialogic aspects of learning in, for example, discussion forums, live chats, or video calls. The role of the teacher as subject matter expert and pedagogic architect is undermined.
The problem here is that such framings align tightly to reductive conceptualizations of education as a transactional process based on specified inputs generating predetermined outcomes for individual learners. Reducing the teacher function primarily to facilitation makes it easy to sideline the teacher as professional in the interests of efficiency, scalability, and individual consumer-learner choice. Movements in digital education that emphasize automation, scale and on-demand access often contribute to this deprofessionalization, making the delegation of the teacher function to automated systems or an underpaid, undervalued academic precariat seem supportable or even inevitable.
Digital technologies are often seen to enable the unbundling and devaluing of the teacher’s role into discrete functional units such as subject matter expertise, instructional design, facilitation, learning support, pastoral care, assessment, and so on. In this way, much discussion of digital education seems to assume the desirability of the efficiency imperative: the standardization, routinization, and automation that undervalue subject expertise and the broader critical and social capabilities of the teacher, while overvaluing generic skills such as facilitation. Our own recent work has argued that learnification is intensified in new ways by digital and data technologies (Knox, Williamson, and Bayne 2019).
We argue in our manifesto that digital education is not inevitably complicit in the erosion of the teacher’s role and professionalism. As we have suggested, teaching is situationally contingent and inherently multiple, with many “best” and “better” practices. Good education requires the exercise of teachers’ professional and critical judgment in the context of the particular educational context in which they are working. The increasing mobilization of digital technologies in the practices of education provides opportunities to rethink what both teaching and being a teacher mean. As it becomes clear that other actors beyond the human can be enrolled in the role of the teacher (Bayne 2015b; Dillenbourg 2016), so human teachers can engage in reflective learning on the effects of the digital in their professional practices (Littlejohn and Hood 2017). The professional judgment of teachers is central to how we understand the value of human and digital actors coming together to “do” and “do better” education.
High-quality education—as most teachers know—is inherently complex, subtle, and various, making the subjection of teaching to the procedural fantasies of standardization and routinization framed as best practice highly problematic. Digital education should not be complicit in replacing teaching—understood as a rich set of practices, often emergent with new technologies, but always highly professionalized—with reductionist notions of facilitation that place teacher subject expertise and critical professional judgment in the background of educational practice. Online teaching should not be downgraded to “facilitation.”