This page contains the text of the revised (2016) manifesto. To read the 2011 manifesto, visit the 2011 page.
The PDF
Download the manifesto in PDF format.
The video
(video creator: James Lamb. Read more about his creative process.)
The text
Manifesto for teaching online – Digital Education, University of Edinburgh, 2016
Online can be the privileged mode. Distance is a positive principle, not a deficit.
Place is differently, not less, important online.
Text has been troubled: many modes matter in representing academic knowledge.
We should attend to the materialities of digital education. The social isn’t the whole story.
Openness is neither neutral nor natural: it creates and depends on closures.
Can we stop talking about digital natives?
Digital education reshapes its subjects. The possibility of the ‘online version’ is overstated.
There are many ways to get it right online. ‘Best practice’ neglects context.
Distance is temporal, affective, political: not simply spatial.
Aesthetics matter: interface design shapes learning.
Massiveness is more than learning at scale: it also brings complexity and diversity.
Online teaching need not be complicit with the instrumentalisation of education.
A digital assignment can live on. It can be iterative, public, risky, and multi-voiced.
Remixing digital content redefines authorship.
Contact works in multiple ways. Face-time is over-valued.
Online teaching should not be downgraded into ‘facilitation’.
Assessment is an act of interpretation, not just measurement.
Algorithms and analytics re-code education: pay attention!
A routine of plagiarism detection structures-in distrust.
Online courses are prone to cultures of surveillance. Visibility is a pedagogical and ethical issue.
Automation need not impoverish education: we welcome our new robot colleagues.
Don’t succumb to campus envy: we are the campus.
manifesto for teaching online by digital education, University of Edinburgh is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Any chance you’re creating an infographic version? I LOVE this.
thanks, Sasha! Not necessarily an infographic, but we will have digital & paper postcards available soon. We encourage and welcome remixes, so if you have infographic skills we’d *love* to see that!!
Is this already in process, or would you like input?
hi Mary! There’s an annotatable manifesto space set up by John Robertson – http://scalar.kavubob.com/ed-manifesto-for-teaching-online—digital-education-university-of-edinburgh-2015/manifesto-sequence-as-presented – which we’ll definitely be keeping an eye on! The 2015 manifesto is in process, but of course we’ll continue to revisit and discuss it, so comments and input more than welcome any time.
Thanks!
Dear all, Dr. Macleod told me about the manifesto and – loving the whole idea of a manifesto and the text as such – I tried to create some pictures for it. You can find them on my blog. The pictures link to downloadable versions on Flickr. I would love to hear what you think…
http://www.schwindenhammer.com/2016/06/02/manifesto-madness/