1. Introduction

We are here today because we teach online, and we like, maybe love, teaching online. We all have taken different paths toward online teaching, and we are here because online teaching matters to us. Given the range of experience in GSOLE, we have members who have been teaching online since it was an emerging “supplement” to “brick-and-mortar” teaching, a route to affordability in education, or a venue toward equity in education and career preparation (Kumar & Eisenberg, 2023, p. 1; Ubell, 2017, p. 6). Others are brand new to online teaching, still discovering the nuances that make online teaching much more than an alternative to tradition. Regardless of why we teach online, we can probably agree that online teaching requires recalibration, revision, and translation of the way things were in teaching.

What is interesting about the ranges of our online teaching experience is that we are all either practicing or prospective online teachers now. I could be wrong, but I doubt that there will ever be a point, as we look forward, when we don’t have online teaching. Additionally, even though the trauma of 2020 is over, there is a lingering “what if” in our collective teaching psyche: it happened once because of a pandemic, and it could happen again. Which is why I want us to think and talk about online learning and consider what works, why it works, and what learning we still have to do.

We need to seek truths and consistencies as we search for nuance and innovation.

2. An X-Files Connection

I invite you—if you know The X-Files series—to imagine the series theme as ambient music for a few minutes. Even if you have not watched the series, you probably know that it documents the investigations of two intrepid FBI agents, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, who travel throughout the country to look into cases that defy “normal” explanation.

I had always wanted to watch The X-Files but had never made time. In summer 2023, when there was so much media buzz about the 30th anniversary of the show launch, I read article after article and one book before the series relaunch in September 2023, and I discovered these infobits:

• The “Scully effect” was a statistically provable phenomenon directly attributed to the series: the number of young women in STEM fields and eventual careers increased substantively because of Scully, the female lead who did forensic investigations of the victims (WWEST, 2019).
• The series, ostensibly about finding facts and evidence to explain the unexplained, was scaffolded on an array of episode categories: the alien conspiracy ones, the funny ones, the monster-of-the-week, and some just too different to categorize. But ultimately, it was about searching for the truth (Francis, 2023; Robinson, 2023; Tsintziras, 2023).
• The series has an enduring appeal, even 30 years after its initial run, which started in September 1993. As Bethan Jones explains, “the reason we keep coming back to the show is because of what it tells us about the time we’re living in” (2023).

Armed with facts, background knowledge, and expectations, my husband and I started watching when the series was released to streaming services. We were immediately hooked by the elements and characters: aliens, government conspiracies, professional friends who might actually be dangerous enemies, green slimy ooze, monsters, evil people, a smart doctor, an unrelenting FBI agent, and the slogan: the truth is out there.

We were not just watching an entertaining story; we were engaged intellectually. We watched The X-Files with our phones in hand, doing on-the-spot, just-in-time research in every episode, looking for that town in Russia, that town in Florida, that case that sounded really real, that condition that Scully was investigating.

And then there was Mulder's office.

3. What Files Mean

For me, it was Mulder's office that pushed the series beyond compelling fantasy. His office was in the basement of the FBI building, an ambient symbol of the FBI’s attitude toward Mulder’s relentless search for truth. Mulder's office—the purposeful clutter, the feeble light streaming through the basement window, the repository of past cases, the enormous document projector—was a space of hope, belief, evidence, records, and possibilities, organized in big file cabinets filled with files.

The first time I saw Mulder’s office, I thought, “Wow! This looks a whole lot like my office.” I’m not exaggerating. I’m on the second floor, not in a basement, nonetheless just like Mulder's with an upright file cabinet, piles of books everywhere, posters, artifacts from past teaching, filtered light from my big window. I was transfixed by how much my office looks like Mulder’s.

A trope of The X-Files is the many scenes where, faced with a puzzling new case, back in his office, Agent Mulder confidently pulls a relevant file from his file cabinet, a file connected peripherally or directly to the current case. The first time I saw him pull a file out of his cabinet, hand it to Agent Scully, and argue for a connection from the past with a current reality, I felt a tiny shiver of recognition and understanding because that's what I do.

In my upright file cabinet and long, low credenza are probably hundreds of teaching files, color-coded by class or activity, nicely labeled. What's in them? Handouts, artifacts from specific classes, great student essays, articles that I used over and over in my research, documents that record my teaching.

In a discolored manila folder, with a taped-on label because the adhesive is gone, is a student essay titled “My Closest Friend,” but I labeled it “Cindy Essay.” Cindy was the fabric doll my student received on her first birthday, a doll that comforted her through shots, pneumonia, middle school, and growing up. Here’s a lovely line from the essay: “I knew Cindy cared . . . because she had a heart. To make Cindy a loving and caring doll, my Aunt Kathy embroidered a little red heart on her chest.” As she grew older, my student let Cindy go. Here’s how she ended the essay:

Today, Cindy’s resting place is in my cedar chest. Since she was my closest friend during my childhood, I decided she deserved a place in my cedar chest with all my other treasures. When I visit Iowa, I always get her out and look at her and give her a huge hug as a sort of thanks for all the good times and for listening to all my problems.

Looking at the file in the context of Mulder’s repository of files, I wondered why this essay had seemed worth saving. I used it for years as a mentor essay. It is not just an essay about a doll but about childhood passages, about friendship, and about leaving things behind and moving toward new things. When students read the essay, they felt that “I can do this” inspiration, which is what mentor essays do. It was a file that enabled me to be a better teacher of writing.

Let me talk about one more file, a yellow file folder in which I saved an entire issue of The New Yorker. The south wall of my university office is an enormous picture window that leaks horribly when it rains. The magazine cover is ripped and discolored from a flood in my office. I wrote a Sharpie note on the water-damaged cover in large, black letters: “SAVE. Includes Trouble with FRIES.”

"The Trouble with Fries" (2001) is the fascinating backstory of McDonald's French fries by Malcolm Gladwell, the 10,000 hours-to-expertise author (2008). The French fries article is super interesting, packed with details about potatoes and McDonald's French fries. For a long time, I used this article as an example of how we can turn an ordinary object (like French fries) into an interesting research project. Yes, I could find this article online, but having the whole thing in a yellow file folder nestled among my teaching treasures makes this artifact of my teaching much more special.

Back to The X-Files connection: our files help us understand the present and plan for the future. The files hold the story of what has been and the promise of what can be.

The files we store, organize, and treasure are more than records, more than artifacts. Like Mulder's X-files, our teaching files symbolize our readiness to work, to move forward, to connect what has been to what we are discovering each new day of teaching. Our teaching files form the basis of truths. They remind us of what we have done and what we have yet to do.

4. Looking in the Teaching Rear View Mirror

When the pandemic happened, I had been teaching online for a very long time, but once upon a time, like you, I was in classrooms with students. The activities, the interaction, the drifting around the class, the workshopping, the laughter . . . this is now what Swartz, Nyman, and Livingston refer to as "the rear-view mirror of our teachings" (2021, p. 8).

Let's take a moment to look in that rear view mirror. So many things happen in face-to-face classrooms. Think of how you characterize or define your in-person teaching presence. Are you creative, spontaneous, organized? Do you type out lectures? Do you teach sans notes? Do you stroll around the classroom as you teach? Do you perch on the desk? Do you show up 15 minutes before class starts to mingle with other early arrivers? Do you dash in just in time? Do you prepare great slides? Do you ad lib? Do you use props?

Although most of us are back in traditional classrooms, we remember the sadness of those early days when we were catapulted into full-time online teaching in 2020. We missed so much about our face-to-face classes. But, as we look in the rear view mirror, we have to look forward too, toward ways to continually revise, reconstruct, translate, and as Swartz, Nyman, and Livingston advise, “reflect on favorite and best practices that we felt were essential to better learning and now to find ways to transform interactive, social learning from face-to-face contexts that were familiar to [us], to recent screen-to-screen realities” (2021, p. 8).

I went back to face-to-face teaching, reluctantly, in spring 2023. I had been happily teaching online since 2014; I had redone all my classes to reflect principles and tenets for good online teaching. I won my institution’s Excellence in Hybrid and Online Teaching Award. Still, that spring 2023 day, walking into my first face-to-face class after several years of online teaching, felt new, exciting, and undeniably vibrant: everyone in the same physical space synchronously, a real classroom, late arrivals, shuffling of desks, technical issues with the console, noise, excitement, distractions, synchronicity but also a bit of productive chaos.

In contrast, our online classrooms are lists of learners in the classroom or gradebook spaces in our learning management systems (LMS). It occurred to me, not long ago, that my teaching files might now be the materials in my LMS menu bars. I panic every time we get a "purge" message from the university telling us that our past classes are being archived and we will have to request access if we want something.

When online learning became universal in 2020, those of us who had been teaching online for a while already had different files, what we might call O-files, online teaching files. Maybe not in manila folders but somewhere . . . .

5. Traditions, Technology, and Possibilities

The pandemic made us think that face-to-face teaching was aberrant, temporary, that someday we would all go back to normalcy; but what has happened instead has been a branching out into possibilities that merge traditional teaching and ever-expanding ways of connecting with learners. While online teaching may have been the primary mode of teaching in 2020 and for a while past that, we did not boomerang back to “normalcy” (Kumar & Eisenberg, 2023, p. 3). Most of our institutions have modalities and delivery systems that are shaping new definitions of pedagogy: synchronous, asynchronous, distance, hybrid, hyflex, and many other derivative, descriptive terms that reflect the predictive insight of Marshall McLuhan in his classic 1964 book, Understanding Media: “Any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment. Environments are not passive wrappings but active processes” (p. viii).

I am struck by how so many years (decades) ago, the connection between space, embodiment, and humanity was already being observed. Let's see if McLuhan's comments apply to online learning.

Let's think a bit about our O-files, our online teaching files.

What we have done before in traditional classrooms supports our new ways of learning. It was in our real-world classrooms that we established our pillars of teaching and created the platforms that support our pedagogies. But, the fluidity of technology creates a space of perpetual revision, change, and new application.

Ultimately, however, we are not creating new ways of teaching but are instead translating what we've done—what is already in our teaching files—into a new space, as Melissa J. Kenzig observes: When translating a course to the online environment, there is actually no need to start ‘from scratch’ in order to create learning objectives. . . . What course developers need to keep in mind is that how students learn when in a room together is different from how they learn individually in an online course. (2015, p. 626)

Online teaching is a different learning and teaching platform; celebrating that difference creates opportunities for growth as instructors and learners.

6. Creating Our O-Files

In the days when I taught in traditional classroom, I almost always got a new dress for my first day of the semester. I always created a special meet-and-greet activity. I usually had some sort of “prop” to hand out to all the students, an object obviously or symbolically reflective of writing. I wanted to make a good first impression.

The first thing we lost in online teaching platforms was physical presence. When I started teaching online, it took me a few semesters to realize that students cared that they could not see me. I learned this the first time one of my online students came to my office. She stood in the doorway, stared at me and said, "You don't look ANYTHING like what I imagined." What she had imagined was quite unflattering, so, I started putting pictures of myself in my online lessons: me smiling at my home office, outside wearing my pink sunglasses, with my granddaughter Penelope in Anchorage, in a traditional classroom with students, and winning my online teaching award. Students have told me they love these images.

This is what I would call an O-file: an ever-growing collection of pictures of me doing things that I can work into my teaching materials. This new understanding has changed how I teach online. This is a simple but real pedagogical transformation that is now an O-file. No, I do not have a computer file of a lot of pictures. I wish I did because that would make things easier.

Let me offer a “definition” of an O-file: an O-file is a teaching innovation driven by a pedagogical exigency in the special spaces of online teaching. O-files can be scattered or collected in our digital storage spaces; or O-files may simply be new ways of teaching that now shape what we do in our online classes. Wherever they are housed or curated, O-files reflect connections between past teaching successes and evolutions into online teaching.

Let’s look at another O-file innovation: Teacher talk. In traditional classrooms, teacher talk can be formal lessons, but it can also be banter, instructions, conversation, directions, clarifications, all of which are missing in online learning . . . unless we learn how to translate teacher talk into online spaces. Here’s an example: instead of posting lists of due dates in a module folder, I have started creating short—30 to 60 seconds—videos showing what’s due when. Figure 1 is an example of how we can integrate teacher talk into an online class. The actual video with my narration is only 45 seconds but is packed with information my freshman writers and dual enrollment students needed to know:

There is something about written instructions that students find off-putting, boring, or even confusing. Conversely, the voice and presence in this 45-second video gave the students an in-class vibe. Because this was a first week video, I recorded myself doing the narration, but I do not usually film myself because Richard E. Mayer suggests that seeing the speaker on the screen does not enhance the learner’s processing of images and text (2021)

To create O-Files for teaching, we have had to see the symbiotic relationship between space and the way our learners embody digital spaces. In his great book about patterns of innovation, Where Good Ideas Come From (2010), Steven Johnson suggests that space is vibrant, alive, malleable: “If we want to understand where good ideas come from, we have to put them in context. . . . Our thought shapes the spaces we inhabit, and our spaces return the favor (p. 17).

Our O-files are our repertoire of good ideas about teaching online.

7. Student voices

What happens when technology, pedagogy, and space merge innovatively to trigger creative learning? Figure 2 suggests that effective online teaching is a triangulation of understandings about pedagogy, technology, and space.

We have learned to design teaching that incorporates students as users (Coen & Greer, 2023). In online learning, we embody a new pedagogical space that creates intense attention to how learners learn in these new spaces, what Mayer refers to as the science of learning in multimedia platforms (2021).

I'd like to share a very specific example of how my O-Files became teaching reality.

For their culminating course project in fall 2023, my first-year writing students, in a synchronous online class, did multimodal presentations. They picked a film they liked, for any reason. I created several video microlessons on design and visual rhetoric to show them possibilities and to guide them in creating a tight, audience-centered presentation to share findings and reflections about their movie. They viewed and responded to each other's presentations.

I was not expecting the enthusiastic responses I got from the students. Here are some examples:

1. The one activity that to me felt the best was the film project as it allowed me to talk about something I really enjoy, which was really cool and it also allowed me to see the different ways classmates see different medias that I have enjoyed, overall it felt like a really great and fun project.
2. I really enjoyed this project and I would absolutely love to do a similar project like this. . . . I loved doing this project very much; I thought I knew a lot about this movie since I watched it multiple times, but doing this assignment made me have a much deeper understanding all together.
3. What I like about these comments is that the online environment is not mentioned as a deficit. The students are focused on what they learned and how they changed as learners.

This next example made me smile when I read it. In the days before the fall 2023 semester started, I was intent on doing an “inclusive introduction,” a term I learned from my GSOLE colleague Kevin DePew (2023; 2024), who explains that inclusive introductions forge connections with students as we share tidbits about ourselves, our likes, our identities. It took me about four hours to do my five-minute “Meet Your Professor” video for one class, but I felt my time had been worth every second of that effort when one of my students posted this:

The welcome video was a really surprising and recurring experience upon watching it. Surprising, in that the rest of the online classes I am taking do not have such a well put together video of the professor introducing themselves. I could tell right off the bat that the video must've taken a lot of time to make. In turn, that reassures me in knowing that I am learning from a professor who cares about her students’ classroom experience. Be it face to face, or in this case online. I love how in the second video you are describing what we will be learning and reading in each module this semester. Like most classes the syllabus is our only guide in what will be going on throughout the semester, and if you have questions email the professor. However with English 3300 I can just fall back on the welcome video if I ever get lost in what the modules are covering.

I am looking forward to take this class! I have taken a long break from school and having a warm welcome to my major like this makes me really happy!

Since I’ve started making the inclusive introduction videos, students comment on how they feel a classroom “vibe” because of the video, as this student explains:

One thing that made me feel like if I was in a face-to-face class was the short introduction of the professor. I have had other online courses where the professors don't really introduce themselves, so learning several things about the professor made me feel as if we were in person.

These comments remind us that we make innovations and translations in online teaching because of our students. Our students help us see how to be better instructors of online literacy.

8. A new space for teaching

We are in a new space.

In one of the earliest books about teaching writing online, Scott Warnock reminded us that “teaching online, like teaching onsite, is about recognizing your teaching talent zones or areas and finding ways to translate those talents to the teaching environment in which you are working (2009, p. xiv). Talent zones are what we cherish from our former way of teaching in traditional classroom spaces and translate into new ways of teaching in online spaces.

Steven Johnson’s insight about good ideas perfectly explains our trajectory from traditional, classroom-based teaching to thriving in online spaces: “Good ideas . . . want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete (2010, p. 22).

Johnson discusses seven patterns of innovation that give rise to good ideas. Figure 3 shows the four patterns that most obviously apply to the translation of traditional pedagogy to digital pedagogies.

Adjacent possible means that we adapt new ways of doing things “by taking available resources and cobbling them together to create new uses” (p. 29). Serendipity is an “accidental connection,” “a happy accident [that] completes a hunch, or opens up a door in the adjacent possible that you had overlooked” (pp. 108-109). Platform building is emergent behavior that arises from recognizing the properties of new spaces, where “different kinds of thoughts productively collide and recombine” (pp. 182-183, 188-189). Error involves the awareness of being wrong, [creating] a path that leads you out of your comfortable assumptions. . . . Being wrong forces you to explore” (p. 137).

Chaos, discovery, error, tradition, reinvention—Johnson’s ideas invite us to cross boundaries, think outside the box, reconfigure the box, and be happy in what we discover.

9. O-Files and Life-Long Learning

Our O-files are shaped by our forever learning, our drive to keep discovering new ways of teaching so that we can help our students learn and be satisfied in their learning. Forever learning about online teaching is shaped by Mulder-type resolve to keep searching for the truth.

Our O-files matter so much because technology changes so quickly. We have to claim resources, truths, and pillars to help us keep searching for new truths in and about online learning.