1 • Forthcoming chapter in: Lütge, Christiane (ed.), Foreign Language Learning in the Digital Age: Theory and Pedagogy for Developing Literacies, Routledge. The Changing Dynamics of Online Education: Five Theses on the Future of Learning 1 Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis These are times of unprecedented change in education. Digitally-mediated online education looms large as one of the most significant harbingers of change. Potentially, for better or for worse, no classroom and no formal or informal learning process will be left unaffected. Immediately, this statement demands qualification. On the one hand, online education is a classical technological disruption of traditional practices of teaching and learning. Yet on the other hand, some of the technological changes represent in pedagogical terms, little or no change at all. In fact, worse than that, we will argue some forms of online learning can serve to ossify anachronistic practices, to a point at times where they almost become back-to-the future parodies of their past selves. On the disruptive side of change, business theorists Joseph Bower and Clayton Christensen speak to technology in general when they analyze “disruptive innovation” (Bower and Christensen 1995). This is a variation on an older theme of technological and social change where Joseph Schumpeter famously called capitalism a system of “creative destruction” (Schumpeter 1950 [1976]: 81). Applying their analysis to education, Christensen and colleagues predict enormous change in which some old education institutions and teaching practices die while others thrive (Christensen, Horn and Johnson 2008). In pedagogical terms, implementing technology need not bring about reform. We can video our lectures, but the didactic form of the lecture does not change. We can move from print to e- textbooks, but the genre of the textbook as a medium of content transmission remains the same. We can deliver courses in learning management systems, but the lock-step logic of the traditional syllabus stays the same. We can deploy online tests, but the process of assessment to discriminate the few who succeed from the many who are destined to be mediocre or to fail, remains unchanged. The paradox here is that the transition to new technology—the technological infrastructures provided to teachers and learners by the decision makers in our schools and colleges—may at times force us to replicate didactic patterns of teaching and learning. In this case, technology stifles the possibility of pedagogical innovation, even when innovation is needed and perhaps within reach. Technology does not in itself determine the shape of change. We can put it to different kinds of use; it only has “affordances,” or a range of possible applications. Psychologist James Gibson coined this word, capturing the idea that meaning is shaped by the materiality of the media we have at our disposal. His work is at an elemental, creaturely level: “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (Gibson 1979 [2015]: 119). 1 First presented as a keynote address at the conference, Media Literacy in Foreign Language Education: Digital and Multimodal Perspectives, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Germany, 12 March 2017. Video version at https://newlearningonline.com/fivetheses