Day ten of our quasi-quarantine!
Spent part of it strategizing with the teaching assistants for my ULEC about how to proceed with our course in online mode, knowing that not all students will even be able to join zoomed classes. The online environment is new to us, requiring quite different kinds of teaching and different structures for eliciting student participation, and even when everything's worked out we've been told to expect glitches.
Case in point: I attended a webinar yesterday called Pivoting from In-Person to Online Teaching: Tips and Discussion, featuring the director of the HarvardX online programs... but it broke down fifteen minutes in for technical problems they weren't able to resolve! The speaker's last words before we were cut off:
Have some empathy for what your students are experiencing in a very complicated environment--
Ha! I felt more Schadenfreude than empathy at that moment, but it was a gift nonetheless: I'm definitely not expecting to avoid stumbles now! I'm grateful to be part of a team working on an ongoing project with a defined goal, reassuring at a time when many other structures are stalled or worse. And at New School the students are part of the team, too. Already much of the way on our journey together, I trust we'll be better able to deal with glitches with humor and understanding.
Spent part of it strategizing with the teaching assistants for my ULEC about how to proceed with our course in online mode, knowing that not all students will even be able to join zoomed classes. The online environment is new to us, requiring quite different kinds of teaching and different structures for eliciting student participation, and even when everything's worked out we've been told to expect glitches.
Have some empathy for what your students are experiencing in a very complicated environment--
Ha! I felt more Schadenfreude than empathy at that moment, but it was a gift nonetheless: I'm definitely not expecting to avoid stumbles now! I'm grateful to be part of a team working on an ongoing project with a defined goal, reassuring at a time when many other structures are stalled or worse. And at New School the students are part of the team, too. Already much of the way on our journey together, I trust we'll be better able to deal with glitches with humor and understanding.
