MI Picks is a pilot initiative to engage the McMaster community with recently published teaching and learning scholarship and its applications to practice.
Seven articles were chosen for this issue on the theme of negotiating time and space in online learning.
We were inspired by McMaster’s Fall 2020 Experience Survey recommendations on “reducing the [work]load”, as well as our own radically shifted sense and use of time and space while teaching and learning online. We were interested in seeing what the scholarly literature might say on these themes to affirm and provide insights into our experiences.
Together, these selected articles:
- Highlight different perspectives and positions on temporality and spatiality in online learning, including insights from students, instructors, course designers, and university administration.
- Analyze contextual factors informing negotiations of time and space while teaching and learning online, including attention to care work, inequities, neoliberalism, and the impact of “flexible capitalism” on workforce expectations to be agile, available, and adaptable.
- Offer new conceptions – like polychronicity and temporal flexibility – for understanding our online realities.
- Illuminate the workload intensification that students and instructors often face when teaching and learning online.
- Introduce critical tensions to the notion that online teaching and learning is “more accessible”.
- Identify opportunities and creative approaches to time and space in online environments, including the possibilities of “slowing down”, balancing care and academic work, critically evaluating and outlining expectations, accurately estimating – to facilitate a reduction in – workloads, bridging gaps between the temporality of e-learning and the timeline of academia, and reading/writing science fiction.
- Encourage us to pause to consider the consequences of being increasingly flexible and malleable. How can we maintain our professional and personal boundaries against market pressures to become “better and faster” learners and workers?
Summaries written/edited by: Alise de Bie, Elisa Do, Dani Pryke, Celeste Suart, Jee Su Suh, Emunah Woolf, and Vanessa Wong