Join us for a 4-week virtual, author-facilitated reading experience with Flower Darby!
A leading voice on online education, Flower Darby draws on the sciences of learning, emotion, and motivation, three decades of her own teaching, extensive research on online student experience, and the stories of joyful online teachers to present concrete tips for making online teaching more rewarding.
The key, Darby suggests, is learning to love teaching online. To that end, her book offers instructors accessible, inspiring, common-sense hacks for connecting with students, finding passion, navigating the structural inequities of higher ed, and more—all with a focus on building rapport and relationships, the central ingredients of happiness and satisfaction. These time-tested strategies and hard-won insights promise to help online teachers find meaning, purpose, and, yes, joy in their work—and, consequently, to fulfill the enormous, largely untapped potential of online education.
Published in April 2026 by Oklahoma University Press.
Dates: October 5 - November 1, 2026
Format: Asychronous on Perusall platform -- participate on your own schedule!
Cost: $15 for 8-week access to the ebook and the event in Perusall
Please note: the course will be available for participants to continue the conversation for 4 weeks after the conclusion of the event. You may unenroll at any time.
Flower Darby is an internationally sought-after author and keynote speaker whose work celebrates and promotes effective teaching in all modalities to help all students learn and succeed. She currently serves as Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Estrella Mountain Community College. Throughout her career, she has held several leadership positions in higher education, including Associate Director of a Teaching and Learning Center, Assistant Dean of Online and Innovative Pedagogies, and Director of Teaching for Student Success. These roles have allowed her to build on her experience teaching in person and online for over 30 years in a range of subjects including Psychology, English, Technology, Education, Leadership, Dance, and Pilates. Her new book is The Joyful Online Teacher: Finding Our Fizz in Asynchronous Classes (2026), and other books include The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching (2023) and Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes (2019).
