Internet Learning Volume 5, Number 1, Fall 2016/Winter 2017 | Page 35

Internet Learning
teacher and many students. Instructors
deliver content, and students are assessed
on their grasp of the material.
Even the highly touted Massive Online
Open Courses (MOOCs) preserve the
essential elements of traditional education:
large classrooms, erudite teachers,
and final assignments.
Many educational futurists have
attempted to predict what changes are
coming in online teaching and learning.
A small group of Scottish teachers
and students may be on the forefront of
not only predicting, but creating that
future. At the University of Edinburgh,
the faculty and students of the MSc in
Digital Education decided to address
the issue of what digital education ought
to become in the future. Their vision
was first published in 2011 as the first
Manifesto for Teaching Online. The document
emphasized the principle that in
learning, distance should be perceived
as a positive principle, not a deficit. The
authors pointed out that digital education
is often described as an inadequate
replication of offline experiences, or as
a second-best approach to teaching and
learning (Bayne, 2006). One of the coauthors
summarized the work in developing
the Manifesto as trying:
... to push at the limits of online
pedagogy, and to construct as virtuous
those things which are often
considered to be deficits. In short,
we see no reason to cast technologically
mediated learning as being
any sort of “poor relation” of the
campus-based, face-to-face, programme,
but rather that it serves to
focus our attention on those things
that are truly important about
learning environments, such as relationship
and dialogue, by whatever
means these are brought about
(Macleod, 2014).
The manifesto itself was created
using the kind of richness only possible
in an online context. Drafts were
refined using methods that encouraged
interaction among students, colleagues,
and other stakeholders in a process the
leaders called remixing, in concert with
the Creative Commons movement and
the final document was assembled, rather
than authored, by the Digital Education
group. James Lamb, a student in
the MSc in Digital Education program
noted that the Manifesto was developed
using collaborative processes:
One of the most attention-grabbing
propositions within the original
2011 Manifesto was that digital
environments offered new ways of
constructing and sharing academic
knowledge and content. Text was
being toppled, we were told, and
there were many ways of getting it
right. (Lamb, 2015a)
The Original Project
The first version of the Manifesto
was presented by one of its
co-authors, Jen Ross, at the Online
Learning Consortium conference
in Las Vegas in 2012. She noted:
The session was well received. The
aim was for the group to discuss
and generate new Manifesto points
reflecting the perspectives of those
in the room, as a way of prompting
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