Teaching and Learning in Zoom Networking Environments

There is a growing dynamism to inspire academic staff to network through Zoom technologies in teaching, research, and supervision. This dynamism has increased demand for more responsive and customized modes of understanding curriculum research and practices in online Zoom settings. Network learning involves interpersonal and relational characteristics as situated within the online classroom, signifying that the teacher has an important pedagogical role in supporting students through their journey to become innovative educators. Another focus within the field of network learning is whether technology is an independent force driving teaching and learning that is socially shaped and co-constructed by its design and context when it is taken up in online settings by the teacher and learner or whether technology and its synchronous and asynchronous features are seen as defining the educational practices of the teacher and learner (Castells, 2000; Goodyear et al., 2014; Gourlay, 2015; Jones, 2015; Van Dijk, 1999). Such a focus prompts the recognition that online and blended learning are at times endowed with specific ethical tenets that support curricular research within Zoom networking environments. As such, the guiding questions for this discussion are as follows: What theoretical ways of knowing are made durable when synchronous platforms become modes of attachment for online doctoral learners? What signification processes are theoretically embedded through the sociomaterial interactions within synchronous and asynchronous practices of doctoral learners? How might we know the ways in which curricular designs within particular online environments endow incommensurable relations of knowledge among the students and other material actors? What epistemological tasks enable mapping the ways in which human and nonhuman interactions come into being and simultaneously constitute communities of learners and collaboratively enhance student learning within online settings? How do we design curriculum to build students’ trust that allows their agency to emerge through familiarity with the social and the material as shaped by the experiences embodied within network learning?