Gail J. Mitchell and Carolyn Steele

Pedagogy is a critical foundation for quality in online education. Creating educational activities and interactive designs that enable one’s pedagogy are crucial for success. This interactive session will provide opportunities for collaborative discussion about teaching-learning in an online environment where everyone contributes to the curriculum and the design for learning. Informed by complexity pedagogy, and the idea of threshold concepts, attendees will develop a learning activity for engaging the community. The activity will integrate the foundational principles of complexity pedagogy—self-organization, emergence, non-linear change, and imaginative engagement. Following a demonstration of complexity pedagogy in an online undergraduate course on Women’s Health, participants will develop a discussion topic, rationale, and resources for engaging the larger community. Particular attention will be given to concepts of: liberating-constraints, troublesome knowledge, and conversational discourse and their implications in higher education. A look at how to evaluate learning in a network of teachers-learners will be considered.