This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration of The Manifesto for Teaching Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2020 Manifesto continues in the same critically provocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrates, its publication could not be timelier. Though the Manifesto was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the 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 for Teaching Online offers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching.

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Over the past decade, the voice and speech recognition industry has established itself as a multibillion-dollar global market, but at whose expense? In this forum article, we scrutinize the case of Sanas, a US-based company offering an AI-powered accent-modification technology that is tailored for the off-shore call center industry. We offer this critique through a virtue-based framework for AI ethics. Our commentary exposes Sanas as an agent of racial commodification and linguistic dominance, as it rests on the perceived superiority of standardized US English. We discuss how racial commodification enables capitalism. Sanas, and similar programs, are not helping build a more understanding world; it is helping perpetuate and maintain harmful raciolinguistic ideologies that maintain language discrimination and continue to frame the language practices of racialized speakers as deficient. Thus, we write this piece with the intent to expose the fabricated humanity of accent modification technology whose existence perpetuates capitalism’s reliance on dehumanization for economic advancement and the legacy and reproduction of white language superiority.

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Higher education institutions (HEIs) have been required to abruptly move their education online in response to recent events. Prior to these challenging events, the twenty-first century was already bringing an increased emergence of new digital tools which have begun to profoundly change higher education.Technology has always existed as a disrupter. The danger is that rapid uptake to online maintains the status quo. This conceptual article will examine the shift from feedback as one-way transmission to two-way Socratic, sustainable learning conversations. It is widely recognised that students consistently report that feedback is provided sub-standardly in higher education. New paradigm approaches to feedback aim to utilise interrogative feedback and Socratic discussion to facilitate a change in output (e.g. feedback uptake). The objective of feedback is to advise, encourage and improve output. The article aims to explore the potential for technology to enhance relational dimensions of teaching practice. The intention is of this work is to serve as a clarion call for intentionally designed digital feedback tools and processes that move beyond technology as yet another means of domineered telling but to aim to empower and provide opportunities for students to respond.The key is to empower institutions and therefore academics to reap the transformative benefits of digital innovation and encourage Socratic, sustainable and dialogic feedback through re-examining the relational dimensions of tutor/teacher relationships.