Abstract How do Higher Education (HE) academic staff depict their experience of online education? In this article we report how they discursively construct both themselves as actors in online educational spaces, and their efforts as desirable and worthwhile. We conducted an interpretative qualitative analysis, examining the discourse and discursive practices of staff at an Irish university as they discussed their experiences with online education. Our findings consist of two 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 staff’s 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 conclude by discussing the implications of our findings, particularly critiquing the trend to fit staff into our theoretical notions of what online education practice should look like. We 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.