Just as the orchestration of resources within a digital artifact will influence representations of academic knowledge, design decisions concerning the platforms and networked spaces where teaching takes place have an impact on pedagogy. From a technical perspective, the term interface is broadly understood to denote an application or program that enables a user to communicate with a computer or a comparable digital device. From an online teaching perspective, the most obvious example of an interface might be the institutional learning management system (LMS), where a student can access essential course information, including assessment details, timetables, lecture slides, and reading lists. In the higher education setting, it has also become the place where students submit assignments. The LMS is normally accessed using a university portal and often links to academic databases, discussion boards, and other networked environments. Therefore, the LMS is an interface itself, but it also acts as a gateway to a series of other interfaces over which the teacher and institution have varying degrees of control.
In the overtly multimodal and visually rich spaces of the Web, the challenge of building an online course presence includes individual teachers in thinking about accessibility, content, and navigation, but also how layout, color, font, image, and other design devices support and enhance opportunities for learning. Individual teachers rarely have meaningful control over the design of the institutional LMS interface they use. Yet even here, and in the absence of any design background or training, when the teacher scrolls down the list of possible typefaces or drags the cursor across the palette of background colors, he or she will be guided by a tacit understanding that the choice made will influence the interpretation of the meaning that is conveyed. Arial is almost certainly better than Papyrus in setting the tone for a course on political activism, for instance. In this way, the design choices teachers make can subtly influence learning through the way that students are guided toward a particular conceptualization of the course and its pedagogy.
The relationship between interface design and learning can also be usefully explored through the example of the discussion forum that has become synonymous with online teaching. At the point of creating the discussion forum, the teacher exercises some degree of control over the structure, function, and appearance of the discussion forum. This might include aesthetic choices concerning template and layout, perhaps followed by assigning administrative privileges, establishing who will be entitled to open new threads of discussion, and whether conversation will be presented in cascading style. Design decisions taken at the point of configuring the forum can have considerable bearing on whether students choose to follow and contribute to conversation or whether discussion moves to another networked space (or simply falls silent). The choices described here can influence whether the individual student chooses to share his or her ideas with the class, but can also more broadly help to negotiate a particular course ambience and ethos. Going further, as the teacher establishes rules relating to member status, posting privilege, and approval, he or she can engender (or challenge) particular course power relations while projecting a presence that manifests beyond class discussion. Meanwhile, informality and collaboration might be nurtured by arranging activities in social media spaces, or what Fitzpatrick (2011a) refers to as the “profoundly dialogic spaces of the web.”
As teachers monitor the discussion forum or uploads a list of resources to the course site, their status in the function tab of the LMS might be suggestive of the multiple roles they have come to perform: author, administrator, student mode. If these different editing designations imply an ownership or control over the representational and functional elements of the learning platform, from a sociomaterial perspective, the teacher-designer agency is situated within a wider assemblage of opportunities, interests, pressures, and resources. The educational interface is a complex assemblage of visible and invisible materialities beyond the immediate control of the teacher. While some teachers will have reasonable freedom to make decisions around the selection and configuration of different learning environments, many others will be tied in to the systems and spaces that are supported by the institution. Inevitably, institutional strategy and procurement decisions are unlikely to meet the pedagogical needs of every course of study or cohort of learners.
When each interface brings its own possibilities and constraints that shape its perception and use by students, the newly acquired LMS might be welcomed by the teacher who likes to communicate a body of knowledge through video lectures, but could prove inadequate for a colleague whose teaching depends on synchronous discussion and interaction. Going further, a sociomaterial attention to the wider network of materialities of educational practice also draws our focus to the influence of code buried within the interface of the application (Edwards and Carmichael 2012). As Selwyn (2009b) argues in his discussion of the connectivities of digital education, the code that exists beneath learning platforms can shape social relations and structure in hierarchy in ways that are counter to the pedagogic aims of the course itself. Therefore, where aesthetically informed decisions around interface design can influence the nature of online learning, we are reminded that teachers do not exercise sole agency even when they have reasonable freedom to choose the platforms where learning will take place. When a teacher glances at her designated editing status at the corner of the wiki or course web page, she might consider that her authorial agency is shared with a multitude of other social and material interests beyond the academic content she wants to share with students.
Our manifesto point draws attention to this complexity and its implications for teachers. We emphasize what we see as a neglected aspect of higher education pedagogy generally, but particularly in its digital forms: its aesthetic and design dimensions and the power relations that flow from these. We are, rightly, asked to be well versed in how to ensure accessibility of digital teaching resources to all students regardless of their specific learning needs; however, we are rarely asked to reflect on the everyday design decisions we make as we carve learning spaces out of institutional LMSs for ourselves and our students. LMSs themselves are generally not particularly friendly to the idea of teacher flexibility and control of interface, to the extent that building an online course is often seen as being the responsibility of learning technologists or other learning support professionals. Yet this kind of unbundling of the teaching role may well not be appropriate where there are complex, responsive, and subtle decisions to be made about the structural organization of our digital classrooms and the social relations that cascade from these. As teachers, we need to be able to assert the pedagogic aesthetic that is right for our students. Aesthetics matter: interface design shapes learning.