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Happiness in teaching, termed Eudemonia, comes from a perception of a relationship with students. Such a perception is vital to sustaining teachers in their work in both on- and offline contexts. While the importance of these relationships has been acknowledged, there have not been attempts to account for how teachers pursue relationships and the accompanying sense of happiness. It is in this frame that we discuss findings from a larger study of online teachers working to support students with disabilities in a part-time program at a large virtual school.

The chapter considers expectations for online teachers and sets up a dialogue between same and different as they relate to on- and offline pedagogy. It then asks more questions about these responsibilities in the context of efforts by teachers to feel legitimate in their claims to relationships with students.

Stories that both elicited and threatened Eudemonia are shared and discussed. In particular, the authors learned that online teachers desired relationships with students to such a great extent that they were willing to narrate relationality into most interactions with the students.

These findings suggest the difficult emotional work that online teachers must do in order to consider their work with students as beneficial. More work is needed to think about how relationships between teachers and students online can be leveraged for greater learning and to sustain both teachers and students in their work.

This chapter offers in-depth insight into the teacher work that online learning requires. It also offers a unique theoretical approach in the juxtaposition of stories of relationships with students online and offline.

Algorithms are widely used to manage various activities in the gig economy. Online car-hailing platforms, such as Uber and Lyft, are exemplary embodiments of such algorithmic management, where drivers are managed by algorithms for task allocation, work monitoring and performance evaluation. Despite employing substantially, the platforms face the challenge of maintaining and fostering drivers' work engagement. Thus, this study aims to examine how the algorithmic management of online car-hailing platforms affects drivers' work engagement.

Drawing on the transactional theory of stress, the authors examined the effects of algorithmic monitoring and fairness on online car-hailing drivers' work engagement and revealed the mediation effects of challenge-hindrance appraisals. Based on survey data collected from 364 drivers, the authors' hypotheses were examined using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The authors also applied path comparison analyses to further compare the effects of algorithmic monitoring and fairness on the two types of appraisals.

This study finds that online car-hailing drivers' challenge-hindrance appraisals mediate the relationship between algorithmic management characteristics and work engagement. Algorithmic monitoring positively affects both challenge and hindrance appraisals in online car-hailing drivers. However, algorithmic fairness promotes challenge appraisal and reduces hindrance appraisal. Consequently, challenge and hindrance appraisals lead to higher and lower work engagement, respectively. Further, the additional path comparison analysis showed that the hindering effect of algorithmic monitoring exceeds its challenging effect, and the challenge-promoting effect of algorithmic fairness is greater than the algorithm's hindrance-reducing effect.

This paper reveals the underlying mechanisms concerning how algorithmic monitoring and fairness affect online car-hailing drivers' work engagement and fills the gap in the research on algorithmic management in the context of online car-hailing platforms. The authors' findings also provide practical guidance for online car-hailing platforms on how to improve the platforms' algorithmic management systems.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the process of work identity construction unfolds for gig workers experiencing unstable working relationships in online labor markets. In particular, it investigates how digital platforms, intended both as providers of technological features and online environments, affect this process.

The authors conducted an exploratory field study and collected data from 46 interviews with freelancers working on one of the most popular online labor markets and from online documents such as public profiles, job applications and archival data.

The findings reveal that the online environment constrains the action of workers who are pushed to take advantage of the platform’s technological features to succeed. This interplay leads workers to add new characteristics to their work-self and to and to develop an entrepreneurial an entrepreneurial orientation.

The study offers insights to platform providers interested in improving workers’ experiences in online labor markets, highlighting mechanisms for uncertainty reduction and diversifying a platform’s services according to gig workers’ identities and orientations.

The study expands the authors’ knowledge on work identity construction processes of gig workers, detailing the relationship between work identity and IT, and documents previously unexplored antecedents of entrepreneurial orientation in non-standard working contexts.

This paper has two purposes. First, to provide insight into the formation of completely online small groups, paying special attention to how their work practices develop, and how they form identity. Second, to pursue conceptual development of a more multi‐level view of completely online group experience, which can be made visible through analysis of the unique interaction logging system used in this study.

The authors conduct a mixed methods study that integrates interviews, grounded theory analysis, case study methods and social network analysis to build a multi‐layered view of completely online group and community development.

Completely online group formation is explicated as a socio‐technical system. The paper identifies themes of tool uptake and use, and patterns of interaction that accompany group formation and development of completely online group practices. These patterns show little respect for the boundaries of space and time. It then shows how groups who are paired together for two non‐sequential activities develop a common internal structural arrangement in the second activity, and are viewable as groups in the larger course context in four of six cases.

The time bounded nature of the group and community, combined with the educational context limit the generalizability of these findings.

The study shows how completely online group development can be made visible. Managers of work teams and teachers who work with classrooms in completely online contexts need to recognize the dynamic structure and interaction practices of completely online teams.

First, little research has been conducted on completely online group formation. Second, a conceptual understanding of how group members relate to one another and how groups interact with other groups in the same socio‐technical context is not explored in prior work. Third, the paper performs this analysis including data from rich, contextualized usage logs, which enables greater insight into online group interactivity than prior research.

In this chapter, we theorize about online freelancers’ approaches to work flexibility. Drawing from an ongoing digital ethnography of US-based online freelancers pursuing work on digital platforms, our data question the common conceptualizations around the flexibility of online freelancing. We posit that the flexibility of where to work, not when to work, is the most important attribute of their work arrangement. Our data show (1) the online freelancers in our study prefer the stability and sustainability of full-time work over freelancing when both are offered as remote options; (2) full-time remote employment increases these workers’ freelancing control / flexibility; (3) these workers keep freelance work options open even as they transition to more permanent full-time work arrangements. We discuss how these findings relate to workplace culture shifts and what this means for contemporary working arrangements. Our insights contribute to the discourses on knowledge-based gig work and for what it means to study individuals online.

Political skill has emerged as a concept of interest within the information systems literature to explain individual performance outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to adapt political skill to technology-mediated contexts. Specifically, the authors seek to understand political skill's role in shaping microtask workers' opportunity recognition when utilizing online communities in microtask work environments.

The authors tested their research model using a survey of 348 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers who participate in microtask-related online communities. MTurk is a large, popular microtasking platform used by thousands of microtask workers daily, with several online communities supporting microtask workers.

Technology-based political skill plays a critical role in shaping the resources microtasking workers rely upon from online communities, including opportunity recognition and knowledge sharing. The ability to develop opportunity recognition positively impacts a microtask worker's ability to leverage online communities for microtask worker performance. Tenure in the community acts as a moderator within the model.

The present study makes several contributions. First, the authors adapt political skill to an online community to account for how microtask workers understand a community's socio-technical environment. Second, the authors demonstrate the antecedent role of political skill for opportunity recognition and knowledge sharing. Third, the authors provide empirical validation of the link between online communities and microtask worker performance.

In order to explore how informal pedagogical moments are being renegotiated by the technology woven into people's lives, this paper aims to focus on online communities as sites of learning; more specifically, the informal work‐related learning practices of self‐employed workers in these cyberspaces.

This paper draws on the notion of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) from situated learning theory in order to examine the development of work‐learning practices online. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with own‐account self‐employed workers (contractors and consultants who do not have staff) about their engagement in online communities for work learning.

Findings indicate that these self‐employed workers were learning work practices, the viability of doing particular work, how to participate in online communities for work learning, and how to participate in fluid knowledges. The significance of developing a work‐learning practice is emphasized, as is the impact of multiple and peripheral positionings across on‐ and offline spaces.

Web technologies and shifting configurations of online collectives shake up notions of expertise, beliefs about who is able to produce, and consume information, and where one locates themselves, in order to build work‐learning practices. Multiple positioning across several online communities, and ways of participating that are peripheral, partial and part‐time warrant further examination.

The value of this paper is its exploration of how self‐employed workers develop an online work‐learning practice and the tensions that these practices bring. The paper also attempts to discuss the utility of LPP for contemporary learning practices.

This study focuses on work from home (WFH) issues faced by faculty members of higher education institutes in India during the coronavirus infection (COVID-19) pandemic. The study aims to understand the impact of these issues on faculty productivity. The study also analyzes the moderating effect of information technology (IT) training on the relationship between work- from-home issues and faculty productivity.

This study is quantitative. Data were collected from 215 faculty members working in higher education institutes in India. Correlation and hierarchical regression analysis have been used to analyze the data.

The analysis revealed that online teaching, lack of technology acceptance, poor working environment and work–life conflict negatively impacts faculty productivity. Thus, IT training work as a moderator plays an important role in reducing the WFH issues mainly Online Teaching, Lack of Technology acceptance & Poor Working Enviornment by increasing faculty productivity. IT training work does not moderate the relationship between work–life conflict and faculty productivity.

This research is limited to the higher education sector; the research limits the generalization of the higher education sector's finding to other sectors.

The findings would help policymakers and educational institutes to explore the use of digital technology to break boundaries of workplace and education institutes to disseminate knowledge to a global level. The findings also help to understand how the workplace is essential for the smooth functioning of tasks of the institute.

The study will also help management, institute, organization, society and individuals to change their mindset that education can be imparted through online mode in a better way with the help of digital technology.

There is a scarcity of research work examining WFH issues in conducting mandatory online classes due to COVID-19 pandemic and COVID-19's relation to faculty productivity in the higher education sector. This study contributes to the knowledge regarding the impact of COVID-19 on faculty productivity in the education sector.

The use of collaborative group work is an important teaching and learning strategy for online and blended courses. However, the challenges of collaborative group work, such as the lack of online technology skills, time conflicts, differences in team member participation, and logistics of online and blended teamwork, often leave students dissatisfied by the process. To maximize the benefits and minimize the challenges, students should be supported in the development of skills with the use of relevant (often emerging or Web 2.0) online technologies and the development of skills related to online and blended collaborative group work. The Phases and Scaffolds for Technology Use and Collaborative Group Work course design process was developed to address this need and is shared in this chapter along with an action research-based case study designed from an action research approach. The purpose of this study was to find out what students thought about the aforementioned course design process, as well as to find out which online tools were most beneficial for online collaborative group work. Based on the results of the survey, the Phases and Scaffolds for Technology Use and Collaborative Group Work course design process had a positive impact on student satisfaction, student learning, and student success and the most beneficial and valued online collaborative group work tools included Skype, Google Docs, and Adobe Connect.

This paper aims to explore workplace learning practices within two types of crowdwork – microwork and online freelancing. Specifically, the paper scopes and compares the use of workplace learning activities (WLAs) and self-regulatory learning (SRL) strategies undertaken by microworkers (MWs) and online freelancers (OFs). We hypothesised that there may be quantitative differences in the use of WLAs and SRL strategies within these two types of crowdwork, because of the underpinning differences in the complexity of tasks and skill requirements.

To test this hypothesis, a questionnaire survey was carried out among crowdworkers from two crowdwork platforms – Figure Eight (microwork) and Upwork (online freelancing). Chi-square test was used to compare WLAs and SRL strategies among OFs and MWs.

Both groups use many WLAs and SRL strategies. Several significant differences were identified between the groups. In particular, moderate and moderately strong associations were uncovered, whereby OFs were more likely to report (i) undertaking free online courses/tutorials and (ii) learning by receiving feedback. In addition, significant but weak or very weak associations were identified, namely, OFs were more likely to learn by (i) collaborating with others, (ii) self-study of literature and (iii) making notes when learning. In contrast, MWs were more likely to write reflective notes on learning after the completion of work tasks, although this association was very weak.

The paper contributes empirical evidence in an under-researched area – workplace learning practices in crowdwork. Crowdwork is increasingly taken up across developed and developing countries. Therefore, it is important to understand the learning potential of this form of work and where the gaps and issues might be. Better understanding of crowdworkers’ learning practices could help platform providers and policymakers to shape the design of crowdwork in ways that could be beneficial to all stakeholders.