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.

No abstract

The motivation of this chapter originates in an interest in the so-called dropouts, non-completing or disengaged participants of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). In this chapter called invisible learners. Invisible learners are defined as the non-active and disengaged participants of MOOCs, who do not participate in and complete the course activities and possibly also drop out of the course. The objective of the chapter is to study how to characterise different learner groups in MOOCs, and to discuss, which educational formats can accommodate invisible learners in professional development. The chapter is based on an empirical study of an open online course designed specifically for different types of learner engagement by allowing for different levels of participation. The study is primarily based on 11 interviews and a questionnaire answered by 51 participants. The analysis identifies five different levels of participation, named students (enrolled), attendees, members, observers and visitors. The chapter concludes that activities and assignments of students and attendees in a MOOC can provide a key centre for networked learning activities of invisible students that use these activities as part of or as an extension of their own professional practices.

The objective of the paper is to examine how and what the non-completing participants of MOOCs learn. In this paper we term them invisible learners. The paper presents a qualitative study of learning activities and outcomes of invisible learners. The study consists of 11 interviews with MOOC participants and a survey answered by 51 participants. The results of the study show that invisible learners learn by 1) reading and watching, 2) following and being part of, 3) networking, 4) reflecting and 5) applying. Further, the study shows that the learning outcomes of the invisible learners can be described as 1) inspiration, 2) update, and 3) input for practice. Invisible learners show signs of self-governance by choosing what is relevant to them, and initiating their own learning activities in relation to their own practice. The paper concludes that there are educational potentials of the activities of invisible learners. The study shows that the course format may not be suitable for invisible learners that do not wish to do assignments and follow specific learning objectives. Rather, the educational potential is to provide invisible learners with relevant input to their own practices. To accommodate invisible learners, the challenge is to design courses that provide input and inspiration to learners' own practices without prescribing what they will learn.

We will present a framework for establishing distance education in schools by combining Networked Learning and media ecologies seen as both environments and as relations between media. Our model for such a framework is called The Flexible Meeting Place and can be used in schools that lack teachers in certain subjects, and also in schools that want to extend their teaching to other schools in the world around them. The school can become an arena, where children as part of their schooling start to communicate globally. The study is rounded in the project Assisted Distance Teaching in Primary Schools (Forsøg Med Assisteret Fjernundervisning i folkeskolen: ASSIST, 2018) that developed tools to ensure appropriate vocational levels in school classes where there was a lack of teachers educated in the specific subject. This project involved 12 Danish schools, with 2 partner schools in Kenya and Greenland. The focus was on the development of pedagogical methods and technical experimentation. In Assisted Distance Teaching in Primary Schools, the thesis was that a teacher who knew about either the subject, the pedagogy or the technology could support a teaching assistant through a digital mediated connection. It turned out that everybody involved, teachers, children and citizens, began to collaborate through network mediated by online app, tools and services and adapt to the circumstances according to their actual knowledge and to develop new knowledge in collaboration. Based on the above, we will present a pedagogical model with a number of challenges and questions that suggests ways to establishing networked learning through a networked school. The theoretical framework, the model and the reflections around it are meant to support the further development of processes, a preschool teacher or teacher in a school can organise together with the children in her or his class. It is an attempt to push school systems into becoming networked and giving children the opportunity to act locally and globally. This development of schools are supported by an organisation like World Economic Forum, who in their recommendations for a future school system, talks about global citizenship, learning using digital technologies and even make education possible without one having to have access to school buildings.