Abstract

During the pandemic, the pivot to emergency remote teaching highlighted the depth and extent of inequalities, particularly in relation to access to resources and literacies, faced by higher education institutions. Imported solutions that failed to take into consideration the constraints and cultures of local contexts were less than successful. The paucity of practitioners with blended and online learning design experience, training and education grounded in diverse contexts made local design for local contexts difficult to carry out. Although there is substantial research and guidance on online learning design, there is an opportunity to create a text deliberately oriented to practice. Further, online learning design, as a field of practice and research, is strongly shaped by research, experiences and practices from a hegemonic centre (usually in the Global North, where peripheries also exist). While many of the textbooks written from this perspective are theoretically useful as a starting point, the disjuncture between theory and practice for practitioners in less well-resourced contexts where local experiences are invisible, can be jarring. This book aims to create a space for learning designers whose voices are insufficiently heard, to share innovative designs within local constraints and, in so doing, reimagine learning design in a way that does not reproduce the binary power relations of centre and periphery.