Teaching & Learning in Online Spaces

We've been asked to teach a 10 week course in 9 weeks. For me, this should be a piece of cake - each summer, I condense a 9 week short course from Cuesta College into a 6 week short course for summer session. I have done this for nearly 10 summers, so one would think a week's worth of snipping would be simple. I spent a frustrating day alternating between my course content and various shiny distractions. It could well be that I need a break - certainly I'm feeling that lack of  focus that comes from stress - but it's also that I'm making incremental changes from one week to the next. This is not hard work like chopping firewood, but hard work like lining up dominoes and finding a gap halfway through that needs to be addressed by nudging every piece by exactly 1/4". It is tedious. Creating an online course is usually completed over three terms; one to create the online shell while teaching the course in person, one to launch the course online, and one to fix...

If you're a Cal Poly professor, I have a gift for you. In the dashboard, you'll find the online workshop called "Launching a Course Online with Canvas" that has a template for welcoming students to an online course. The letter was written for "normal" times, and should be sent out approximately a week prior to the start of class, with a reminder sent out again the day before class starts. For the most part, it works well in our unusual circumstances. I want to share with you what I'm telling my students, and I'll include it below. This is a work in progress, but it will go out to them a full week prior to the start of class (by Tuesday, March 31.) I want them to have the gift of TIME: to look around the online class (I will open it up on Sunday, April 4th) to ask me questions via email if they have any to put important items on their calendar, like purchasing the code for our simulation software to absorb what they will be completing in the...

I am staring at my PowerPoint files from last term, and I notice how many of those slides reference current events. How clever was I to work in the CES show in January into my lectures? How fun was it to post memes (which, let's be honest, my students probably saw 6 weeks before I did) into the pages! And how ominous that I referenced the early concerns for a virus that was spreading halfway across the globe, and certainly would remain a distant point of compassion and interest, but not a very present danger. Those were naive days. And now, as I prepare to convert portions of those lectures to video for my students, I want to be sure I do not put myself in a difficult position if my Fall course needs to be accessed online (or partially online). I want to create evergreen content - that which can be used well into the future for my course, or other similar courses that may benefit from the information. To do this, I have made a copy of my Winter term materials on my computer des...

I'm overwhelmed. I've been teaching online for 20 years, but the past three weeks of my life have been incredibly complex. Working from home is not a big deal for me - at my last job, I often worked from home and established work "zones" and a daily routine that helped me focus on what needed to be done, but this is different. This time, I've spent the past three weeks setting up and delivering workshops for faculty, answering numerous questions, calming a lot of jittery friends who are not sure how this is going to work, and - I kid you not - I was berated for posting a helpful comment on behalf of my own lengthy experience to a group of faculty. In times like these, you find out who people truly are. But here I am, staring at my computer screen with content that is mine, that I am familiar with, and there is nobody but myself urging me on. I am tired. I feel demoralized from events that took place in the days prior to sheltering at home. And I need a break...

Wow, it's been 5 years since I posted on this blog! Quite a bit has happened since then. I got a cat, and -- well, perhaps I need to skip the recap and just jump ahead.These are interesting times, after all. I'm writing this on March 28th, 2020, during the Covid-19 Pandemic. I'm on my 16th day of home isolation with only two trips out to the store for food. (Did you know you can pinpoint a date (March 12 was my first day working from home) and type "Days since [date]" into Google and it will give you a number to let you know how many days have passed? Now you know.) I'm reviving this site while moving my last Face to Face (F2F) course to the online environment to accommodate the campus plan to have all courses taught virtually in Spring Quarter of 2020. I know there are others with very good and positive attitudes toward moving online, but I may be the only person giddy about it. This is my 20th consecutive year teaching online, and while I'm facing ...

I am writing this blog post while on a plane to Hawaii. All around me I see the glow of small (and not-so-small) screens as people are viewing stored movies, accessing their Kindle libraries, playing games. I have abandoned my playlist in favor of a soothing batch of “nature sounds” tracks on my Android phone’s Ambient Noise app – it helps my nerves during the turbulence we are experiencing. I am tremendously grateful the small children on board are two aisles over and engrossed in their mother’s iPad. We are no longer told to turn off electronics other than setting our phones to “Airplane” mode at takeoff. My laptop is open, and I am working a bit, preparing for the three online classes I will be teaching shortly, and updating my work calendar and making notes to be organized when I get back. I am also thinking about my New Years Resolutions, considering what I’ll tackle in 2015. This is a flight ritual for me in this Age of Electronics: I purge my brain of work on the way t...