Spaces and places in online learning: perspectives from students and staff

This paper is based on work carried out by the two authors during the first six months of 2021 – a period by which the practices of online learning and teaching had become familiarized and - to some extent - even standardized in our institution, as in most others.

We are interested first and foremost in the online teaching space as a social space: as an environment designed to facilitate the interactions that adhibit learning and teaching. How suitable are the environments that we have created to achieving such outcomes? Is it reasonable - for example - to describe the environments in which we learn and teach online as ‘spaces’, using the same word (and in virtually the same sense) that we use to describe the familiar physical teaching spaces of bricks-and-mortar locations?