Imagining better pedagogies is the first step in creating powerful learning environments. Better, for the authors of this collection, means more humanizing pedagogies that embrace the fact that the people in our learning environments are fantastic, curious, unpredictable, capable, and multi-layered. In this edited collection, authors from four continents will share their theoretical and practical work on designing their online courses in higher education through the lens of critical instructional design. Critical instructional design champions a problem-posing digital design approach grounded in the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Maxine Greene, Ira Shor, and others. These chapters challenge current common practices and assumptions in online education, while also challenging our assumptions about who our learners are and what power they should have in learning spaces.

Since 2011, Hybrid Pedagogy has published over 400 articles from more than 200 authors focused on and around the emerging field of critical digital pedagogy. The collection, and its sibling collection Designing for Care, represent a wide cross-section of higher education culture from different countries and features articles by women, Black people, Indigenous people, disabled people, queer people, and other underrepresented populations. The goal is to provide evidence for the extraordinary work being done by teachers, librarians, instructional designers, graduate students, technologists, and more-work that advances the study and the praxis of critical digital pedagogy.