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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.

This chapter aims to explore education as posthuman practice via the anatomy of a lesson plan. The lesson is narrated through the methodological device of speculative fiction. It is a fabulation set in the future but with roots that tangle with the past. Dark histories and futures are set to flicker here. Deception, de-identification and datafication lurk everywhere. If you are squeamish, you may wish to read no further. The datafication of people, their reduction to numbers, bytes and, most fatally of all, words, is laid out here in gory detail. If you do wish to read on, however, then you need nothing: just come as you are, and be assured as always that as the reader, choice is yours.

This article undertakes a critical appraisal of learning design and its relation to ethical ideas of care. We give an account of three personae of near future learning designers, developed using speculative methods, seeded with real-world data comprising job advertisements and validated with learning designers. The personae illustrate conflicts about the role of learning designers within the teaching and research missions of the academy and issues of care or lack thereof for these workers. The disembodied skills of learning designer job advertisements are contrasted with the bodies of (more than) real people that can suffer and care. We finish by contributing elements of a speculative job advertisement for a learning designer, who will help shape educational spaces of the near future by entangled care and unencumbered attentiveness.

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