THE THEATRE OF ONLINE LEARNING

The Front stage, The Backstage Online, The Backstage Offline

A dramaturgical analysis seeks to understand people’s everyday lives through the aspects of a theatre. I propose that this is a useful analogy for illustrating how students experience learning in an online subject. Based on this analogy, an online student is an actor who crafts performances within the front stage and backstage of a particular university subject.

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When we imagine online students in this way, we acknowledge that they perform across three theatre stages. These stages are the front stage (the Learning Management System), the backstage online (internet websites and social media), and the backstage offline (conversations with family, friends, and colleagues).

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Throughout this site a cast of online students share their learning experiences with you. The creation of these experiences was informed by a fourteen-month study of online university students. During this time data was collected from 224 student observations, 120 questionnaires, 26 interviews, and the content analysis of 1,857 discussion board posts.

Through their stories, their preferences and patterns for individual experiences, group experiences, and the tools they most commonly use for university related tasks come to light. With the cast of online students in mind, I invite you to design and submit a short learning experience that acknowledges how students enact multiple identities across the three performance stages. The learning experiences will be published on this site to symbolise how we can harness our collective intelligence to support online students.