In her plenary address at the 2024 GSOLE Annual Online Conference, the author takes a retrospective as well as projective view of online teaching and learning, considering the television series The X-Files as a metaphor for the adjustments teachers have made to thrive as online literacy educators. A constant in the series is the image of files accessed from upright cabinets, holding the promise of truths to be discovered whenever a challenge emerges. Not unlike the agent at the core of this series, many teachers collected files representing successes and possibilities in their traditional teaching, perhaps stored in manila folders, perhaps scribbled in notebooks, perhaps piled on our desks. The move to online teaching triggered new ways of structuring and planning for OWI: O-Files in which teachers save translations of what they once did in F2F teaching restructured for online teaching. In this address, the author looks at innovative O-Files, reflective of the efforts that drive success in OWI: technologies, design, user experience, learner-to-learner interaction, reconstructions of learning, learner-based creativity. O-Files project truths that scaffold forever learning in the contexts of online literacy instruction.

The global COVID-19 pandemic brought about a number of changes to educational practices, including how academic support units distributed teaching materials to students and educators within and beyond their local contexts. Recognizing an opportunity to share its materials to members of the Auburn University community and beyond, University Writing (UW), an academic support unit at a large, R-1 university, created an Open Educational Resource (OER) that published its extensive library of over 300 writing instructional materials. Throughout the project, UW’s OER team members worked to develop a sustainable model for accessible OER design, publication, and maintenance, which we share in this article, accompanied with recommendations for other OER designers. Our scalable model offers a theoretical framework for OER sustainability using principles of accessibility, labor, cost, usage, and longevity. Our emphasis on accessibility fulfills online literacy instruction (OLI) principle 1: “Online literacy instruction should be universally accessible and inclusive.” Further, the principles we identified for OER sustainability demonstrate our commitment to “regular, iterative processes of...instructional material design, development, assessment, and revision to ensure that online literacy instruction and student support reflect current effective practices” (OLI principle 3).

This article begins with a brief overview of asynchronous online learning scholarship and an introduction to the concept of “crip time” as “a flexible approach to normative time frames” (Price, 2011, p. 62). The heart of this article considers the accessible affordances provided by asynchronous teaching, specifically focusing on “cripping,” attendance and engagement to create more accessibility. We share our experiences teaching writing classes asynchronously as well as student reflections regarding how they feel about learning asynchronously. In so doing, we argue that asynchronous writing classes can leverage crip time in ways face-to-face classes cannot to create more accessible learning.

Good pedagogy is flexible and varied, responsive to the evolving learning needs of students. When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted K-16 teaching and learning practices in early 2020, exacerbating social inequalities such as technological literacy affordances, teachers shared best practices and offered digital teaching professional development—for instance, the use of screen captures, instructional videos, PowerPoint voiceovers, student podcasts, recording and editing Zoom discussions, the living syllabus model, HiFlex design, text-messaging apps, Screencast-O-Matic guides, and dynamic breakout groups (see TLPDC). Although online teaching scholarship is extensive and several decades long, many of us pivoted to remote distance learning quickly, and we discovered that given adequate time to prepare to teach and work with students online, the pedagogy could be quite strong. “Going remote” is different than distance learning, of course, where one is often impromptu and the other affords more planning time. Whatever we want to call it—the “new normal,” post-pandemic pedagogy, getting back to the classroom—we have opportunities ahead, including being online by choice with new understanding (Moore & Barbour, 2023). What worked well before the pandemic, and what we developed while working online by demand, can be blended to rethink distance and time to optimize praxis.