Community, culture and care: mapping relational pedagogy in online higher education

Online higher education is by no means a new phenomenon but, with the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020, attention was refocused on the capacity of online teaching and learning to meet students’ affective and social needs. Positive relationships support these needs but can be challenging to develop when working online. Attending to the relational aspects of online learning focuses attention on the experience of students and educators, and related factors that add value to the educational experience. In order to understand extant research and practice in this area internationally, a configurative literature review of 34 empirical and conceptual papers published since 2020 that maps the characteristics and affordances of relational online higher education (HE) is presented. Key words used for the search across three international databases were ‘Online’, ‘Relational’, and ‘Higher Education’, along with their synonyms. The analysis of this literature suggests the importance of considering students and educators together within the complex context of online HE and offers both practical strategies and conceptual structures to support this work. It offers a view of digital skills as being, in this context, emergent, for students and educators alike. Arising from analysis, the intertwined foci of culture, community and care emerged. Care related to nurturing relationships, often between individuals, most commonly lecturers and students. Community was a common theme and engaged with the challenges of enabling students to build, and feel part of, a community when learning online. Culture related to the relationships between the student’s home culture, the university culture within the globalised context of HE, and the lecturer's culture. These relational forms are identified as being intimately linked with sustainability agendas that accentuate process over outcome, prioritisation of the collective good and a move away from neoliberal agendas that can be damaging for authentic, respectful education. We call this ‘the 3Cs framework’.