As the course is now slowly coming to an end, I would like to return to «The Manifesto for Teaching Online» and take another look at it. How do I feel now when I look at the contents and read parts of it? What has changed for me?

When I go through the index of the Manifesto, I recognize topics I have dealt with during IDEL. In each of the five sections I find terms that are now more familiar to me, even though I would not pretend to have a thorough understanding, but I can assign some contents to the topics we worked on in the course. In the first section «Politics and instrumental» I find the topics of instrumentalization of education which we read about for instance in Bayne’s article from 2015 «What’s the matter with ‚technology-enhanced learning‘?» Or Hamilton and Friesen’s  «Online education: a science and technology perspective» (2013). The teacher role in online education was also discussed in the weeks 4 and 5. Also, the notion of ‚context‘ and its importance I have encountered in my readings and in discussions.

In the second section «Beyond Words» I find the multimodality concept which is challenging for me. Actually, Lamb’s article «To Boldly Go! Feedback as Digital, Multimodal Dialogue.» (2018) has been the very first reading even before the course started. Not because I don’t have ideas how to present content differently but because I am still insecure if it would be accepted in an academic context as a valuable academic contribution. It But nevertheless I am totally eager to learn more and practise, so that I will be able to present more multimodal work dealing in an academic environment. Also questions about remixing the content is a great topic also in connection with openness and the licensing discussion going along with it. We dealt with the question in weeks 8 and 9 about «Open everything».

Section three of the Manifesto, «Re-coding education», is revealing concepts we treated and discussed as well during week 7 with openness, along with the readings and experiences with the MOOC I enrolled in. Data analytics and algorithms were a topic we in the following weeks with data analytics and algorithms. Unfortunately, these weeks coincided with the first days and weeks of our covid-19 lockdown, during which my team had to work tirelessly to bring our courses from about 20% to 100% online. I had not the time I needed to read all the literature. At least I managed to write two blog posts, but I was not able to follow the activities during the week on Twitter. Certainly, however, in this area I would like to delve into further in order to understand how a responsible use of data could be achieved without disclosing our data and thus losing control over it.

Section four with the title «Face, space and place» is also represented in our IDEL iteration, namely with the themes of space and place. The topic of presence (face) has been discussed to some extent, but there is much more to learn about it. Fortunately IDEL is an introduction, there will be plenty of time left during my studies and in the future to study the topic in depth. Very impressive for me was the sequence with Minecraft, where we were asked to create a place of our own in this three-dimensional virtual space. I would like to return to this in my next blog post and final reflection on the IDEL topics.

Section five closes the Manifesto from a pessimistic or at least sceptical perspective: «Surveillance and (Dis)trust». In fact, I think  we are now on a fine line with these issues, and it is important that we address them. During the course the surveillance issue has been mentioned in several readings in the data analytics part. Also, the question of control is regularly on my plate at work, when faculty asks me, how to control what their students do and what they don’t do. We probably should discuss trust and distrust, and also how you want to be treated as a human being, instead of how to control others.

In general, I find today, twelve weeks after the beginning of the course when I first started working on the Manifesto, I can now better understand the content, I can relate the content to the course and what I have learned about the topics. Of course, many ideas, topics, concepts, models are vague in my perception as I just started. I will need to sharpen my understanding – and my questions! – through further compelling readings and discussions. Many things remain to be experienced in order to be thoroughly understood. In this sense I think I made a first step. I am looking forward to what’s coming next!