Offline Memos for Online Teaching: A Collective Response to The Manifesto for Teaching Online (Bayne et al. 2020)
2022-01-27

This paper is the reflection of the proceedings of a live colloquium held by seven educational researchers in Madrid in August 2021. Point of departure of this colloquium was a shared concern for the ascendance of online teaching as the privileged mode of teaching in higher education. This concern, which had been influenced significantly by our various experiences during the Covid-19 crisis, was recently articulated in an outspokenly affirmative and positive manner by a group of digital education scholars in The Manifesto for Teaching Online (Bayne et al. 2020). In contrast, however, our own discussions showed that, whereas most of us deeply appreciated The Manifesto’s efforts to think through the possibility of genuinely pedagogical approaches to online teaching, we still found fault with its glaring omission of substantial arguments for online modalities of higher education as such. The Manifesto mostly works on the assumption that online teaching can always be of added value vis-à-vis offline teaching, yet often ‘forgets’ balancing out these assets against the qualities of offline teaching that risk getting lost.&#13;\\n&#13;\\nAt the same time, our discussions during the colloquium revealed significant intellectual divergences between the different stances that the participants took with regard to how these particular qualities can be understood and conceptualized. After we failed to come to a shared, unified statement—a manifesto—it was decided that, instead of regarding this as a deficit, we could opt for the alternative idea of a series of short memos, in the style of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988). Inspired by different intellectual stances and interests, yet still in view of a common concern for online, face-to-face higher education, these memos would have to form a disparately resonant ‘call to attention’ for the ascending online modalities and their discourses.&#13;\\n&#13;\\nAccordingly, our paper is divided into seven short sections, each of which forms a memo that expands on one particular quality of higher education—a quality which, while mostly also addressed in The Manifesto, we believe still remains more authentically connected to offline modes of education. The seven qualities under concern are the following: publicness, world-disclosure, friction, joint attention, rhythm, secrecy, metastability. We believe that each of these qualities is already present in offline teaching, even though they are not always noticed and valued, and that the realization of each of these qualities requires specific care and attention in the design of practices of online teaching. In that sense, we do not so much wish to criticize The Manifesto, as to point toward something that risks being forgotten.&#13;\\n&#13;\\nFinally, each memo discusses its quality against the backdrop of a phenomenological description of a real/fictive experience to prevent our analyses from becoming unduly abstract. Except for this shared element, however, the memos do not have any uniform discursive style. Perhaps this perspectival diversity would only add to the strength of our discourse, doing justice to the multiplicity of nuances and values that give shape to the concerns at stake. At the same time, while thus the memos could be read as individual contributions, we have opted to keep them anonymous, viz. to maintain them as interconnected pieces of a collective work. After all, since they are the result of several days of common interaction, their authorship is far from individual