Dissolving the Dichotomies between Online and Campus-Based Teaching: A Collective Response to The Manifesto for Teaching Online (Bayne et al. 2020)

This article is a collective response to the third iteration of The Manifesto for Teaching Online by Bayne et al (2021). Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalisation of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2021 manifesto continues in the same critically provocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrate, its publication could not be timelier. Though the manifesto was written before the Covid19 pandemic, many of the 34 responses gathered here inevitably reflect on the experiences of moving to digital, distant, online teaching under unprecedented conditions. As these contributions reveal, the challenges were many and varied, ranging from the positive, breakthrough opportunities that digital learning offered to many students, including the disabled, to the problematic, such as poor digital networks and access, and simple digital poverty. Regardless of the nature of each response, taken together, what they show is that The Manifesto offers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching.