The still-common assumption that online learning is a lower-quality alternative to conventional campus-based approaches has historical and political roots. The roots are historical in the sense that early online course design emerged from correspondence course models of distance learning (Moore 2013), in which dialogue and scholarly community were replaced by individualized, often isolated self-study. Politically, as discussed in part I of this book, online innovation is frequently directed—or seen to be so—by the industrializing imperatives of economy and efficiency rather than by the desire to develop new forms of critical, engaged practice. These tensions still exist, amplified by the alignment (perceived but also, in many instances, real) of isolating, low-quality online education with extractive, for-profit models of higher education (McMillan Cottom 2017). Such assumptions support the belief that only face-to-face teaching and learning can be authentic, with the power of eye contact frequently cited as emblematic of the quality mark of face-to-face interaction.
Here, we offer alternative readings of how online teaching can enable learning that is not only connected and “real” but also, depending on pedagogical approach, has the potential to be of higher quality than some face-to-face modes. To begin, however, it is important to return to our assumptions about what technology is and therefore what it may do to online teaching and learning. As already outlined in part I and elsewhere, the approach to understanding online education informed by science and technology studies proposed by Hamilton and Friesen (2013) emphasizes the tendency to see technology in either instrumentalist or essentialist terms—either as a neutral tool that functions purely as an instrument of human intention or as an unstoppable force that drives and determines social change. Both instrumentalism and essentialism fail to take account of the social and material codependence of technology and its uses, black-boxing technology and closing it off from further examination (Bayne 2015).
To address this issue, we argue here, as elsewhere, for a sociomaterial perspective that acknowledges the social as inextricably entangled with the contextual and the material, understanding these as “continuously acting on each other to bring forth objects and knowledge” (Fenwick 2010, 105). Here, knowledge is not a prepackaged thing to be transmitted from one mind to another, unchanged by the medium of its transmission, but rather emerges from mutually constitutive sociomaterial relations. Such a perspective opens a space for us to shift away from an assumption that online is the lesser mode and understand it as something different, actively produced by its teachers and learners and determined by its contexts.
To build the case for distance as a positive principle, we start by attempting to counter two linked arguments often used against the online mode: that embodied co-presence and proximity are a necessary underpinning for quality education and that distance education is necessarily isolating, demotivating, and therefore of lesser quality. Philosophies and psychologies of human behavior that seek to separate mind from body are centuries old and have long been challenged, yet were still highly formative in the early days of the internet in general (Barlow 1996), and online education in particular. One of the most-read early texts (Dreyfus 2001, 47), built an entire argument around the idea that to be online was to become “disembodied.” Dreyfus argued that “only emotional, involved, embodied human beings can become proficient and expert,” rendering online education incapable of supporting advanced study. Yet theory, from Stone’s (1991) “Will the real body please stand up?” to more current work on the constitutive impact of the virtual on the materialization of identity in all spaces, digital and physical (van Doorn 2011), has challenged the view that to be online is to be somehow free of body.
When we feel elation or sadness as a result of the content of an email or social media post, for example, we feel those emotions in our bodies. The online learner is not protected or isolated from the embodied excitements, triumphs, and embarrassments of academic cut-and-thrust. If being online in the late twentieth century offered the illusion of freedom from body in the largely text-based digital environments we used then, being online in the twenty-first makes us much more visible to each other, more publicly engaged, often more vulnerable. Technology is no longer distancing; rather, it is its proximities that have become problematic. Ubiquitous social media demand display and the public crafting of self; platforms extract personal data to bring advertisers intimate knowledge of their users; creeping surveillance on campus eases us into a new normal of visibility. We discuss some of these issues further in part V.
At the same time, it might be argued that anyone who sits more than three rows back in a 500-seat lecture hall is a “distance learner.” While students understand the potential of the live lecture for direct contact with their teachers, in many cases the experience is more parasocial—a one-sided relationship with only an illusion of reciprocity. We appreciate speakers who make eye contact with their audience, but we do not expect this to be meaningfully one-to-one. Massified higher education cannot, in many instances, be experienced as intimate. The idea that embodied proximity is essential to quality education is an outdated trope based in historical and elite models of university education in which students were inducted into scholarship by sitting at the feet of the master.
We are not arguing here that digitally mediated teaching is no different from face-to-face but rather that because it is different—and because our assumptions about teaching are often challenged when we take it online—it has the potential to be better in some contexts. Online learning, as we know, can be the basis for opening up a more inclusive form of education to students who need to be able to study without the constraints of being on-campus (working students, parents, disabled students), as well as opening university-level study to new, richly diverse global cohorts. Digital education puts teachers and students in a volatile, creative, and highly generative space where good teachers find their practice being opened up to new ways of doing things. Online film festivals, collectively written multimodal assignments, virtual walking tours, shared virtual fieldwork, and dynamic, ambient social media feeds are some examples from our own practice, and there are many others.
Other advantages of being online relate to the idea of risk taking as an important aspect of some kinds of learning. For example, it has been frequently observed that the online environment can facilitate participation in debate by the less confident, vocal, or verbally fluent of our students and that this can be attributed to the modest reduction of social cues present in that context (Hammick and Lee 2014). Less eye contact can be a release from some of the inhibitions that might be experienced in the classroom setting, allowing a skilled teacher to enable a level of manageable risk that works in favor of less confident students.
There are of course negative issues with the distance mode that need to be addressed. Distance can be privileged, but it is also true that learning online, particularly in its early days, was often reported as isolating and limited in terms of social contact, a factor often seen to relate to reduced motivation and high levels of dropout from online distance courses (Bekele 2010; Simpson 2013). Some more recent work continues to find a negative relationship between online learning and collaborative and social learning (Dumford and Miller 2018). The deficit model of online education often assumes a particular pedagogy in which repositories of self-paced, didactic materials are worked through in isolation and tested via multiple-choice assessments. The high profile of MOOCs has not been helpful in this regard, in that these have for the most part reinforced the alignment of digital education with teacher-light methods. Often touted as flexible anywhere-anytime learning, the self-paced model is often a mechanistic, anonymized learning experience that is not responsive to individual students’ interests, skill levels, or needs. We heartily agree that this offers a lesser learning experience, likely to be demotivating and to lead to high levels of attrition. Other forms of online teaching—fully engaged, properly supported, creative, and community focused—are an entirely different matter.
Even within courses adopting these more engaged approaches, however, we have found evidence of what we call “campus envy” (Bayne, Knox, and Ross 2015). Campus envy is the tendency for some students, even those who are extremely happy with their online courses, to have the vague sense that their learning experience would somehow be even better if they were on campus. The feeling is often undefined and vague but is real for some, who see the idealized campus as a kind of touchstone—a guarantor of the authenticity of academic experience. We discuss the research underpinning the idea of campus envy in chapter 17. Further critical issues are raised in relation to the (often opaque) algorithms that structure our entry points to the social environments that digital educators commonly use (see part III). The threat that algorithmically driven targeting of political messages poses to contemporary democracy, for example, serves to fuel further the anxiety surrounding technologically mediated communications for education (Hindman 2018; Vaidhyanathan 2018).
All of these are reasons for maintaining a constantly critical stance toward the potential of online teaching and learning, and toward our own practice. Online teachers need to be ready to confront at individual, institutional, and political levels the tensions and challenges that emerge in these spaces. However, we should do this from a position of confidence in the quality and creativity of what we are able to offer online, not from a position that assumes “distance” or “online” carries an automatic deficit.
While poorly designed online courses may create isolating, demotivating experiences for students, collaborative, community-driven courses that may include opportunities for peer working and responsive and tailored tutor interaction and feedback are also possible; see, for instance, our own experiences of creating online dissertation festivals (O’Shea and Dozier 2014), collaborative assessments (O’Shea and Fawns 2014), playful experiments with automated teacherbots (Bayne 2015b), and participative learning analytics (Knox 2017b). There will of course be differences in the experience of being a student online, offline, or in a combined blended environment. While in our manifesto we argue that the online can be the privileged mode, we do not do so blindly. It is not always best, but it can—depending on context and design—be better. Online can be the privileged mode. Distance is a positive principle, not a deficit.