Academia During a Pandemic: Hunker Down Philosophy 3A
Today marks the resumption of classes at Bemidji State University, all of which are now housed online. Many of my colleagues around the world have come up with a variety of different ways of flipping their classes over. My focus has been on enhancing online interaction and replacing face-to-face interaction as much as is reasonable. And as I mentioned before, the former involves discussion threads and the latter involves Zoom conferences! Monday and Tuesday encompassed the bulk of my Zoom meetings. One of my classes will meet for a second time tomorrow (their request); otherwise, every class has met, giving me a little insight into how this is all going to go. TL;DR: yeah, it’ll work. Here are a few observations after running 4 sessions:
One More Week!
In a lot of ways, I’ve been pretty fortunate to work for Bemidji State University. While losing two weeks of class sucks, BSU didn’t choose to rush into the university-wide shift to remote learning. The result? A lot more breathing room (for me). So in addition to all of the things I’ve been doing to keep my mind off the nightmare sweeping across the United States (today: taking a walk, playing some video games, and petting my cat), I’ve also been working hard on adjusting syllabi…and tempering my expectations. Even two weeks doesn’t feel like it’s enough…
Academia During a Pandemic: Hunker Down Philosophy 2A
I made it through a week of isolation. Mostly. I still went “out,” but in my car to play Pokemon or to occasionally go to the store to get things I wasn’t able to get earlier. At odd hours. In that time, I’ve apparently decided to blog on a regular basis, catalogue my books (finally), watch an absurd amount of TV, schedule an impromptu podcast recording, and prep my classes for remote learning. It’s been a weird week, y’all. A scary week. The one upside to all of this is that I’m pretty sure most of my classes are going to be OK once we switch over to remote learning. While it won’t be ideal, most of my classes are already fairly embedded in digital tools anyway. For those classes, simply upping the stakes on managing the course wiki and wiki-based assignments is a no-brainer. For the other classes, the big question will be whether we can keep certain things “as is” or whether I need to adjust certain assignments and structures for a different mode.
Online Coursework, Here We Come!
I’ve received official word that classes at Bemidji State University will switch over to remote learning for an undefined amount of time starting on Friday (3/20). I’d assuming this was going to happen when I talked about this stuff a few days ago, so it wasn’t a surprise. And that means all my little preparations for such an eventuality were spot on. Not that I planned to have in-person classes during a pandemic that has a decent likelihood of killing me (asthma FTW!). With that in mind, I’m scrambling to rework my syllabi, put together online resources for instruction and for student activity, and doing my best to work with the technologies I have available to me. So far, I’ve got the following in the pocket: