This July we are launching Digital Pedagogy Lab Courses, a series of professional development opportunities for educators, librarians, technologists, and instructional designers.

Our project has had many starts. We have started it over and over again during long walks, late night discussions, pacing in parking lots, sudden text-message chats. As with teaching and learning, Hybrid Pedagogy itself is iterative. At the core of every iteration, though, is the commitment to educational outreach, to helping teachers and learners navigate, employ, resist, and understand their work in physical and digital classrooms.

The journal was born from questions that rise up when we consider what happens to critical pedagogy in digital, or digitally-influenced, environments — where does agency arise; where does learning happen; how does the digital change or reinforce traditional student and teacher roles and power dynamics; how is our humanity subject to or amplified by the digital; what becomes of scholarship; what does access mean, and how does it affect learning; what do we (or can we) do with the wild innovative possibility of the Web within the architecture of academic institutions.

But Hybrid Pedagogy was never meant to be just another peer-reviewed academic journal. It was designed to question the very form of academic writing, the nature of digital learning and teaching, the process of peer review, and to bring together scholars whose ideas are not regularly broadcast within higher education. As well, it was meant to develop a community of learners, intensely invested in the investigation of Critical Digital Pedagogy. Our educational outreach efforts started very early.

We held our first digital pedagogy Twitter chat in April 2012. We have since held 33 live #digped discussions about topics ranging from Net Neutrality to Grading. In August 2012, we taught the first MOOC MOOC, a meta-MOOC about MOOCs, which has since spun off in 4 subsequent iterations. In October 2012, we held our first live conference, THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy. In November 2012, we kicked off Digital Writing Month, which has run in 2 subsequent iterations. The first Digital Writing Month spawned Twitter vs. Zombies, an improvisational game about Twitter literacy. Finally, we will host the Digital Pedagogy Lab 2015 Institute, a 5-day intensive in Critical Digital Pedagogy.

Today, we’re launching Digital Pedagogy Lab Courses. Compared to the MOOCs, unconference, and public conversations we’ve had up until now, DPL Courses will be smaller, more intimate, and keenly focused on the practical issues of teaching and learning. Classes will have limited seats in order to create a more focused learning environment, and will meet for only two or three weeks online. Learners will engage primarily asynchronously, with a few synchronous activities designed to accommodate global participants. We are also planning some even smaller intensive workshop classes in order to enable more robust feedback and collaboration.

Digital Pedagogy Lab Courses marks the first official offering of the 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that Hybrid Pedagogy formed in 2014. A key difference between DPL Courses and our previous outreach efforts is that there will be fees for enrollment. As part of our non-profit mission, we believe teachers should be paid for their time and effort, that scholars are too often asked to do their work for free, and that recognition in the form of pay isn’t given the importance it should be given in academe. We are a non-profit, so all fees will be used to hire teachers for design and instruction, to provide fellowships, to establish a certification in Critical Digital Pedagogy, and to continue our organization’s other outreach work.

All courses will be offered at minimal cost, with a generous discount for contingent faculty and graduate students.

We will launch Digital Pedagogy Lab Courses with “The Flipped Classroom” in July, led by Kris Shaffer and Jesse Stommel. We’ll follow this with two more courses in 2015, and several more offerings in early 2016. To see what we have in the works, to register, view the course descriptions, or check registration deadlines, visit www.digitalpedagogylab.com.