Online Teaching Communities within Sociology: A Counter Trend to the Marketization of Higher Education

As higher education embraces the ideologies of the market, educators are being asked to teach evermore students with fewer resources. Running counter to the trend of marketization, a decentralized group of educators are taking advantage of Web 2.0 technologies (including Facebook, Twitter, and blogging platforms such as Wordpress, etc.) to collaborate online to share teaching resources, support one another, and improve pedagogy. Open Educational Resources (OERs) are online collections of pedagogical content/media that are freely distributed. In addition to resources, communities of educators are coming together to support one another and provide informal mentoring in what we call Online Teaching Community Networks (OTCNs). We review how OERs and OTCNs are forming within the discipline of sociology to illustrate the potential both have to improve pedagogy and support teachers.