Lessons and Best Practices for Teaching Digital Ethnography

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the UK in March 2020, I was preparing to teach a four-week methods course for graduate students at Oxford during the spring term. Like most of us, I had to learn how to deliver online teaching for the first time, getting to grips with tools like breakout rooms and live quizzes. However, I faced a challenge beyond learning digital teaching: The methods course I was about to deliver was on ethnography, and the structure of my course depended on students completing short bursts of hands-on ethnography. Of course, ethnography generally involves longterm immersion in a community, and with just four weeks of learning, my goal was only for students to glimpse this experience. Nevertheless, precisely because of the lived experience nature of ethnography, I designed activities for my course to mimic actual ethnographic fieldwork, like short bursts of observation of public spaces and inperson interviews.