The Joyful Online Teacher

Online classes provide opportunities for students not served by traditional in-person classes, but asynchronous experiences can seem isolating for both students and instructors. In this episode, Flower Darby joins us to discuss ways to make online instruction more joyful for both students and faculty. Flower is an Associate Director of the Teaching and Learning Center at the University of Missouri. Prior to this position, she served as an Assistant Dean of Online and Innovative Pedagogies and Director of Teaching for Student Success. Flower has over 30 years of teaching experience, including both in-person and online modalities, and is frequently invited as a keynote speaker at academic conferences. She is a co-author of Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Sciences in Online Classes, and The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. Her new book, The Joyful Online Teacher: Finding Our Fizz in Asynchronous Classes, has just been released by the University of Oklahoma Press. A transcript of this episode and show notes may be found at .

You can listen to The Joyful Online Teacher online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

The Joyful Online Teacher is an episode from Tea for Teaching by John Kane and Rebecca Mushtare.

This episode is 40:46 long.

This episode was published on Mar 11, 2026.

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