The Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies at The Open University organised an event looking at critical digital pedagogies and practice. They argued that digital environments often provide more questions than answers and that enquiry into how to teach online (not just how to upload content into the VLE) is key. Questions prompts included:

• How can we reach students?
• How can we create rigorous and invigorating discussions?
• How can we build opportunities for peer-driven learning?
• How can we develop academics in that space?
• How can we incorporate more boundary-pushing pedagogies into digital teaching?

Panel discussion were led by Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris (University of Mary Washington and the Digital Pedagogy Lab) with Naomi de la Tour (University of Warwick) and Daniel Villar-Onrubia (DMLL, Coventry University).

No solutions were given to these questions but comments/further questions included:

• Digital pedagogy should not be reduced to a set of best practices, tools, or interfaces!
• We need to question habitual pedagogies to deepen and investigate students’ needs.
• How can we make space for student’/educator’ agency?
• How do we support students to develop agency in HE having been taught to regurgitate information for exams in their previous educational lives?
• There is a need to discuss interdisciplinarity alongside the need to foster imagination to counteract the fear we find in trying something new.
• Technology entrenches traditional conservative values.
• What and who is education for?
• Combining instructional design with critical digital pedagogy creates imaginative and experimental online learning experiences.
• We began teaching online because we could, but we never stopped to ask whether we should.
• Relocation not replication.
• Digital Pedagogy as an entity in its own right.
• We teach through a screen, not to a screen.
• Learning to listen online is another key skill we and our students need to learn.
• Power and empowerment – the educator-student dynamic.
• Being transparent about our pedagogies - not just what we are going to learn but how, and being upfront about our own pedagogies as they influence how we teach.
• The concept of online space needs to be better understood.
• We need to consider that our student at the other end of the VLE/PC is in a space that offers specific pedagogic affordances that we can use in our teaching.
• We should always be investigating our tools – the need for constant criticality is a key skill for modern academics.
• Concerns about how inaccessible online teaching is were raised – work is needed to improve this.
• Instead of making a course universally accessible to all, we should think about multiple modes of access.

Personally I believe that these questions/comments are all relevant and they will be something I will be revisiting with staff in CTE over the next academic year.