Greg Beatty writes:I think that online pedagogy is still in such a state of infancy that there are no idols that need to be overthrown. There are a number of individual articles that are highly useful, but no guiding canon. To put it another way, pedagogy of the virtual classroom is in the state that composition pedagogy in general was three to four decades ago, when the instructors learned through a densely informed praxis, rather than a specific theoretical frame.
I will say this: most instructional guides that address "how to" teach online do their best to ignore the realities of the situation, which is that many adjunct faculty are teaching under serious time constraints at a number of schools, and that, as Steve Gilbert has repeatedly articulated, the tech support crisis continues to grow. This crisis, in which demands for technological support rise faster than the administration can provide, make most attempts to put a coherently planned online pedagogy ludicrous. At the University of Iowa any teaching assistant who wants one can be assigned a trained support person...who is so overworked that he or she can't return calls for weeks. Similar situations can be documented at every school.