Here we continue the argument by bringing together two points from the manifesto that aim to resist seeing online teaching as a deficit mode. We begin by challenging the idea of contact as an organizing principle for higher education teaching that is applied to online contexts: Contact works in multiple ways. Face time is overvalued. We then argue against the—now largely historical—tendency to see online courses as versions of “proper courses taught face-to-face and on-campus: Digital education reshapes its subjects. The possibility of the “online version” is overstated.
First, what is “contact” in teaching, and why is it considered important? Engagement and responsive interaction between a student and a teacher are essential components of high-quality teaching in whatever mode (Bekele 2010), yet there remains a commonplace sense that these are achievable only through co-present interaction, with eye-to-eye contact often seen as the marker of authentic teaching. Colleges routinely use hours of contact—often understood in the traditional forms of the co-located lecture or seminar—as the primary spatial-temporal organizing device of the academic year.
In our manifesto, we challenge this organizing idea of contact as something that requires physical co-presence, arguing instead for a broader, richer understanding that does not assume face time as a default. We argue that contact can be seen as a sense of nearness and connection to others, a communicative moment that will necessarily be differently experienced in every coming together of people, technologies, and contexts. We suggest that “contact” in its educational sense needs to be rethought and shifted away from its implicit alignment with co-location, co-presence, and synchronicity, to be understood instead as a form of sociomaterial presence that can be enacted in many different ways, including online. It is in extended sociomaterial assemblages that students and teachers meet and make—or produce—contact. No communicative act is about unfettered transmission; all are produced through the social and material entanglements in which they are embedded.
Presence—and contact—are perhaps felt when it seems like nothing is getting in the way of apparently direct communicative interaction and a strived-for meeting of minds—that “perceptual illusion of non-mediation” referred to in the early years of the internet by Lombard and Ditton (1997, 29). Unmediated presence is, however, illusory across all communication modes. The face-to-face encounter is mediated by language, the spoken word, subtle expressions of the body; the literary encounter by the written word and the material properties of the book (typeface, paper, quality of print); and the online encounter by the configuration of screen, keyboard, device, and code. The sense of presence here lies in the perception of the absence of something that exists (language, print, screen). Digital environments in their complexity and frequent changes in form often foreground and confront us with the presence of mediation in a way that other media and moments do not. When the technology runs smoothly, the communicative mediation is elided, and only the intersubjective experience is felt.
As many of our digital technologies have become smoother, more immersive, and less obtrusive, we find ourselves in a postdigital era in which we need to understand contact as something that takes place multiply: a video call is contact, and so is teacher presence on a Twitter feed; a phone call is contact, and so is a shared gaming session; an asynchronous text chat is contact, and so is a coauthoring session on a shared document. These are forms that we can value on their own terms, without always needing to align them with ideals of contact dependent on proximity in space, and visibility of face. Contact works in multiple ways. Face time is overvalued.
We can extend these ideas into the notion of versioning and the perceived authenticity, or otherwise, of online courses. When colleges and universities began to adopt online and distance education, the starting point for designing online courses was often an established course with the same name or curriculum that ran face-to-face. This approach was perhaps comforting: if the online version could be as close as possible to one that had already been established and run on-campus, then teachers and institutions would surely be on safe ground and the risks perceived as embedded in the new medium mitigated. The essential quality of a course, it might be argued, has the best chance of remaining intact within a new medium if it can align itself clearly to the more established and understood mode of delivery. If the quality and form of the on-campus course can be replicated online, then the authenticity and reliability of the online version can be assumed. In the second manifesto point considered here, we aim to challenge this view. Digital education reshapes its subjects. The possibility of the “online version” is overstated.
The focus on versioning implies that online is a deviation from the real thing, that the real course must be the one where humans are co-present in a physical environment. The assumption follows that if we cannot manage co-presence in our contemporary busy lives, then technology can come to the rescue as long as any associated deficits are remediated as much as possible. The focus of course design then becomes to closely replicate the trusted forms and methods of face-to-face teaching rather than to revel in the new and multiple creative pedagogies enabled by the digital environment.
Institutional support for online course design is often framed as mitigating the essential deficit of the online mode. For example, a set of quality review questions for new online courses issued by the University of California, Santa Barbara asks how these will “substitute for face-to-face lectures or meetings” and how verification of student identity will be achieved (University of California Santa Barbara, n.d.). In many ways it is right that such questions are asked, as they encourage course designers to think about the consequences of their decisions. However, it is a helpful thought exercise to consider how we might reverse the online/on-campus binary to privilege the former rather than the latter. For example, why, when setting quality standards for face-to-face courses, do we not ask: How would this course substitute for the lack of opportunities for self-pacing and asynchronous engagement achievable online? How would you ensure that the students have adequate multimodal experiences of their subject, such as those that are available online? How will you know your students have written their own assignments without regular text-based interactions such as blog and forum contributions that allow you to get to know their work and style of writing?
None of the above is intended to deny genuine concerns about the quality of online teaching and learning in some contexts, or its acknowledged challenges. Our argument here is that it is time to move away from seeing online, distance teaching as the deficit model and on-campus, face-to-face teaching as the touchstone of quality and authenticity. The online mode changes how we teach and how we understand ourselves as teachers and students. Teaching online reshapes its subjects in all senses of the word; we now need to move confidently beyond the idea of the version. Digital education reshapes its subjects. The possibility of the “online version” is overstated.