#1 - Champion the Move from Access to Equity. Dr. Gloria Niles at the University of Hawai’i–West O’ahu says that our online learners often experience intersectional disadvantages through structural and institutional hetero-patriarchy, racism, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism. Relying on learners to speak up and request individual changes puts the burden in the wrong place. Guide faculty to take notice if many students are asking for individual changes, accommodations, or affordances in their online offerings. Guide them to think instead of how to lower barriers systemically in the design of their interfaces and interactions, using frameworks like universal design for learning, or UDL.

#2 - Build Care Everywhere. Dr. Maha Bali from the American University in Cairo is a champion for shifting our online design and teaching away from undervalued, unrewarded, affective labor that drains and exploits us. Instead, we should learn how to create space for us to pursue labors of care and support that energize and fulfill us. To go beyond just the feeling of care and support, learn how to foster communities of care at all levels that help to sustain us in technology-mediated environments.

#3 - Online Isn’t Just the LMS. Dr. Shaun Iles at Mohwak College has been using the learning management system for years in order to have a “home base” for the content and interactions in his online and technology-mediated courses. He has also been using communication, storage, and annotation tools beyond the LMS—his latest is Discord—to foster a greater sense of learner engagement, agency, and belonging. 

#4 - Show Faculty that the Text is Their Friend. Dr. Jenae Cohn at Cal State Sacramento is the author of Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading. It’s a common challenge that our learners don’t do the readings to prepare for engagement in our technology-mediated spaces and activities. Guide faculty to apply recent research from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, learning science, composition theory, and the scholarship of teaching and learning in order to frame, scaffold, and implement effective digital content throughout their courses—ones that learners will make time to complete.

#5 - Promote Design to Foster Community Interactions, like Hashtag #Awesome Discussions. Dr. Travis Thurston with Utah State University is all about engaging learners in authentic ways. His concept of “digital powerups” is an example of designing courses for fostering community interactions. It provides online learners with the reason for engaging in discussion or practice by using hashtags to create references beyond the LMS discussion tool, expand the formats that learners can use to show their thinking, and open scholarly conversation to mashup culture. Learn more by listening or reading Travis’s conversation on the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

#6 - Offer the Perspective that Online Can Be Better than In-Person. Dr. Siân Bayne and Dr. Jeremy Knox at the University of Edinburgh are co-authors of The Manifesto for Teaching Online, a series of position statements about what online education could be. Among their ideas about the politics, ethics, and purpose of online learning, one piece of advice stands out: “Online can be the privileged mode. Distance is a positive principle, not a deficit.” In practical terms, we’ve been designing online experiences for decades as “less than” simulacra of face-to-face interactions. We should flip our perspective and start thinking about what we can do together online that isn’t even possible in a real-time classroom environment. We can move from “good enough” by focusing on faces, places, and spaces to create better ways to do teaching and learning.

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Dear ADDIE,

There’s been a lot of talk at my college about using digital badges in our online courses. I’m not sure I understand why or how our faculty would use them.  We don’t have an institution-wide infrastructure that supports badging.  What advice can I give my faculty who are interested in trying them?

Signed,

We don’t Need no Stink’n Badges