This presentation reports on our qualitative study of how higher education academic staff talk about their experience of online education. The study examines how three academic staff in an Irish University, who were engaged in online education in three distinct ways, discursively construct both themselves as actors in online educational spaces, along with how they constructed their efforts as desirable and worthwhile. A key motivation for this research was our concern that too much existing research fails to capture loses, in a real and tangible way, the way in which online education matters to those who create, teach, or administer modules and programmes. This study recognises that higher education academic staff are vibrant, dynamic beings and not variables that we can adjust in order to achieve a particular output, such as high quality online education. We used a discursive psychology analytic approach to examine the discourse and discursive practices of the three participants as they discussed their experiences with online education in semi-structured interviews. Our findings consist of two overarching participant discourses: Involvement in their work existentially matters to staff, and staff and their work exist in a reciprocal relationship with each other. We further divide these into five sub-discourses: their work gave staff a sense of purpose, their work reflected staffs’ senses of identity, staff coped with challenges that their work raised, staff confronted work realities by investing themselves, and staff navigated tensions between being the shepherds or originators of work concepts. We will conclude this presentation by discussing some implications of our findings, which have implications for how we can and should frame staff attitudes towards online education, and critiquing in particular the trend to fit staff into our theoretical notions of what online education practice should look like rather than view staff as dynamic beings. We will call on researchers and practitioners to be inspired by exemplary practitioners, rather than using them as tools that are useful to the extent they allow us to champion our educational interests.