Celebrating online education

With a few beautiful borrowed words from The Manifesto for Teaching Online

I have heard, many times this year, that online education is dead.

It’s hardly worth telling you that I don’t agree — that learning online is too powerful, too important, too beautiful to die. That what has actually died is an illusion of security and assurance, because digital technologies have exploded the traditional “security” paradigm.

Every time I think about this and try to empathise with the security perspective, I find myself in the throes of a solipsistic crisis — how can anything truly be assured?

We do the best we can.

I think the fear, behind all of this, is that people are not doing the best they can. And it’s true, many haven’t been. Many students have been coasting on “Ps get degrees” for decades. Many academics resent teaching because of the way it’s been systematically devalued in their careers or because they never wanted it anyway and they’re really in it for the research. Many institutions are managed by non-educationalists for whom the extreme economic pressure will always win against humanist pedagogy. In the face of these problems, it is easy for me to feel that securing students’ assessment efforts is like trying to stop the last domino from falling — not the first.

But through online education, many of us are doing better than we ever could before.

“Distance is a positive principle, not a deficit.”
The Manifesto for Teaching Online, 2011

Until the year 2020, I was an introvert.

I was shy, mostly quiet, unsure of myself and struggled with frequent depressive episodes. I had friends, but I found it hard to make them, and often to understand why they would want to be friends with me. Crowds were exhausting. I often felt like a child in a room full of adults.

I’d recently given up on management roles at work, having struggled for about two years with people leader roles and getting told by some leadership coaching dude that my personality type was a really strange fit for leadership. I care deeply about people, but I guess I was afraid of them?

Then the human race got sick.

As COVID sentenced all of Melbourne to house arrest, I started a new job at Deakin University and a postgrad course at the University of Melbourne, both of which were rapidly shifted online. And a new version of me emerged.

E¹ was curious, talkative, argumentative. E challenged shaky viewpoints and took initiative to reach out and raise issues. E found eself building communities both at uni and at work, volunteering to lead special sessions and join committees. E mentored people. The filter of the computer screen somehow helped E manage and selectively engage in ways that opened E up to new connections, new possibilities, new social and professional ways of being.

“By redefining connection we find we can make eye contact online.”
The Manifesto for Teaching Online, 2011

Just as E’s Deakin role was being made redundant, E saw a callout for teachers for a new postgraduate program in educational design at Monash. E thought, “Why not?” and applied.

That was three and a half years ago, and E have been teaching in that course ever since alongside a wonderful team: Daniel Purdy, Kristen Morgan-May, Nhung Nguyen, led by the effusive and generous Michael Henderson.²

Each term is short and sharp, almost certainly too short for the richness of ideas and questions and goals that emerge from the many people who enrol in the course. Students connect through the discussion boards, our Teams workspace, live classes, through email. Everyone’s vibe is different, everyone’s needs are different. Some students show up to every live session and have a million things to say. Some can’t make the time, and watch the recordings afterward. Others like to be there, but keep their cameras off and engage via the chat. Some terms, the discussion boards are filled with creative riffing; other terms they’re practically empty. The group’s culture changes everything, every time.

E’ve seen students who are school teachers; students who are homeschoolers. Students looking to move into academia; students who are already PhD-wielding academics looking to build their educational design capability.

All are “mature-age students” (although in postgrad study the term is a bit nonsensical). Many are parents and carers juggling huge physical and emotional responsibilities alongside their studies. Many self-identify as neurodivergent. Almost all work full time. E always have to remind them not to take on everything at once, because they have so many ambitious plans for their design assessments. Sometimes these projects end up in a terrible mess, and E love that — because it means E get to see how they are pushing at the boundaries of their capabilities.

“Assessment is a creative crisis as much as it is a statement of knowledge.”
The Manifesto for Teaching Online, 2011

When people think about online education, they tend to picture click-to-reveal interactivities, Turnitin submission hurdles, auto-marked quizzes. For many in the corporate space, “next” buttons are a source of boundless fury.

To me, online education is not really about any of these things. It is, literally, about connection. Connection to knowledge. Connection to support. Connection to friendship. Connection to possibilities beyond those available in the embodied world. It’s also something that enables me to manage the richness and complexity of those connections, while maintaining my own embodied need for space and solace.

I always try to maintain some connection to past students, if they wish it. I am delighted and bashful that some of them even read this blog and give me their thoughts and critiques — because, I hope, I played some tiny part in showing them their educational perspectives and voices are important and should be heard.

I hope online education is not laid too early to rest. It has changed my life.

1. "E” is a pronoun coined by David Overend in the wonderful essay World wide wandering: e-drifting in Paris and London, to convey “the elusive nature of identity” in digital journeys.

2. I should state that this post is my own perspective, and is not endorsed or in any way connected to Monash’s program!