Challenges to online learning and teaching: a subjective academic narrative

Abstract

The subject of this paper concerns my reflections upon postgraduate and undergraduate online teaching from 1995 to 2014. At the heart of this paper lies a mystory (Ulmer, 1985) about the pleasure of teaching and the transference of that pleasure from face to face to e-teaching. In this paper, I consider scholarship in online learning and teaching and the early adoption of e-learning and e-teaching. I go on to present a snapshot of asynchronous e-learning and teaching, to look at e-models and e-methods. In critiquing intransigent templates, I refer critically to the work of Gilly Salmon, and propose that the quality of the academic input is the most important element in any e-curricula. Methodologically, I describe this as a subjective academic narrative, and theoretically I place it within narrative qualitative discourses. The brave new world of online teaching has become somewhat tattered as the time has progressed from the heady days of the 1990’s when anything seemed possible and a pedagogical revolution seemed certain. Today, those dynamic possibilities are in danger of being replaced by the realities of budgets, of a determination to remain on the campus, and by a distinct feeling that online teaching and learning may be being evaluated and even actually developing as a second rate pedagogy. Unfortunately, some of it is. One way to challenge any second rate online offerings is to submit them to traditional academic guidelines for best practice. Certainly, they should at least meet the bottom line and at best extend it. This paper contributes to this scholarship.