The answers for questions concerning social justice in online higher education can be defined as largely untested and often self-referential. Core to these claims is the rhetoric that online spaces provide equal opportunities for all individuals to freely and openly share their ideas and participate in learning activities. My new book, The Hidden Curriculum of Online Learning: Understanding Social Justice through Critical Pedagogy, challenges the current understandings of social justice in the field of online higher education. It is based on ethnographic work and it is exploratory in nature: understanding online learning spaces as the context of learning while discourses manifest themselves and operate to produce differentiated learning conditions across different cohorts of students. Regarding equity as the fair distribution of opportunities to learn, the book analyses how cultural hegemony creates unfair learning experiences through cultural differences. It argues that such inequitable learning experiences are not random acts but rather represent the existing inequities in society at large through cultural reproduction.

The book aims to create awareness of social justice for teachers, instructors, students, researchers, and scholars interested in the theory or practice of online higher education. I draw upon critical pedagogy to show that while online learning spaces are frequently promoted as overwhelmingly inclusive and democratic, these premises do not operate with uniformity across all student cohorts.

The currency and relevance of this book is embedded in its unique amalgamation of Foucauldian concept of power with post-colonial perspectives of whiteness for analysing the social fabric in online spaces. It shows that power is naturally distributed within any given online community and that it creates sociocultural hierarchy, documenting what it means “to be” online for those who are caught in the “double-bind” of their online presence. Employing the concept of hegemony in the context of online education, the book provides a much-needed cautionary tale for those interested in or involved with teaching or designing online courses or programs and it is worthy of consideration by all educational stake holders and policy-makers alike.

Murat Öztok is a Lecturer in the Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University.

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