Amy Tucker

Scholar of Organizational Behaviour, HRM, Labour Relations, Leadership, and Sociology. Researching Precarity, Belonging & Organizational Life.

I study what institutions do to people – and what people do to survive them.

I am an educator, researcher, and writer with more than 25 years of experience in distance and open learning. I recently completed my interdisciplinary Doctor of Social Sciences at Royal Roads University, where my dissertation – Through Our Eyes – used Photovoice to explore belonging, precarity, and possibility with international students in Canadian higher education.

My scholarship sits at the intersection of organizational sociology, educational studies, and the embodied experience of precarity. I also hold a Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice and a Master of Organizational Leadership and Training focused on building online learning communities.

My Work in Distance Education

For most of my career I have taught and designed courses from contract to contract – a reality that gave me a deeply personal understanding of precarity in higher education. That lived experience shapes everything I write and teach about distance learning.

As a course developer, I have built open learning courses from the ground up – writing learning outcomes, structuring content, choosing assessments, and ensuring that every element serves learners who are working independently, often across different time zones and life circumstances. As a course content expert, I have collaborated with instructional designers to bring rigorous subject matter into course designs that are genuinely engaging and accessible.

I have worked extensively with both paced and non-paced open learning models. I believe that how a course is designed sends a message to learners about whether the institution trusts them – and I take that responsibility seriously.

Research Interests

My research spans organizational behaviour, human rights and social justice, labour relations, leadership ethics, decolonizing pedagogy, trauma-informed education, and equity in higher education. I am particularly interested in the concept of asymmetrical precarity – the ways in which students and contract faculty share the condition of institutional insecurity, yet experience it in fundamentally different ways.

Top Skills

Leadership · Adult Education · Teaching · Indigenization Curriculum · Equity Research · Organizational Behaviour · Labour Relations · Distance Course Design · Participatory Research · Human Rights

About This Blog

This blog is my space to bridge two worlds: the experience of being a distance learner, and the work of designing and teaching distance courses. Whether you are a student, a fellow educator, or simply curious about open learning – I hope you find something here that is useful, honest, and worth your time.

Connecting learners and educators across any distance.