The manifesto for teaching online and the complexities of digital education

The Manifesto for Teaching Online is a statement of common values and principles of the core teaching team of the University of Edinburgh’s MSc in Digital Education. This Manifesto is also a critical response to the corporatization of education associated with the promotion of digital technologies. The Manifesto articulates a positive reframing of digital education and learning that embraces scale, distance and diversity. This chapter explores ways in which the provocations of the Manifesto can shape the opportunities for digital learning to expand and accelerate capacity-building to meet the SDGs by 2030. This chapter uses the Manifesto statement that “massiveness is more than learning at scale: it also brings complexity and diversity” to examine approaches to digital capacity building that attend to geographical and cultural distinctions, the situatedness of effective learning and the entangling of interdependencies across the SDGs.