Archaeology of an online course: Teaching and learning as social engineering

This essay distills pedagogical principles that have emerged through a dozen years of experience teaching a seminary introductory Old Testament course online. The rich interactions and social cues that professors rely on to monitor student learning in face-to-face classrooms are replaced by a carefully choreographed pattern of student learning activities and peer-to-peer discussion prompts through which the professor engineers student learning. A careful description and analysis of the pedagogical intentions and choices embedded in the design of an online course reveals a sociology of online learning and the author's implicit theory of how learning happens.