Courses are cancelled for the rest of the semester, and colleges and universities are expected to provide students with a distance completion option online. Watching how that rolls out and seeing what it entails in my own classes has been revealing.
On a more global level, crisis has shown various powers-that-be for what they are. I’m thinking specifically of the contrast between the many teachers unions that have stepped forward to exert power by offering to help make things work better (without sacrificing teachers) and the very different approach of the few that have grubbed for power by trying to provoke the failure of administrators who are as overwhelmed by the pandemic as the rest of us. The details of how that’s played out on the ground is insider baseball and not interesting to outsiders. But my point is simply that crisis reveals character, and these are insights to be held onto for later.
On a more personal level, transforming a face-to-face course into something that can be given online in a compressed timeframe has been more involved and more complex that I would have imagined possible. I fully expected it to be difficult — just setting up and explaining how to use communication channels that are manageable with 120+ students reaching out every few days is daunting — but today as I was working, I started flipping through one of the legal pads I use for my realtime note taking looking for an idea I remembered jotting down. I flipped and flipped and flipped through iteration after iteration of inadequate idea after undeveloped idea until finally, suddenly, I found myself at the front page of the pad: I’d forgotten work had begun in a different pad. As I stood up to fetch the pad I needed from my other table I felt as if my labor was being gauged by page count: I hadn’t expected creating online materials to be a two-pad problem!
Now, after a few days of work, I feel like I’m nearly ready to send out documents, thankfully, and just in time: courses start back tomorrow. (Are my colleagues? I hope so. Whether they are or not, I’m confident they’ll manage.)
In my case — and this feels like yet another Tinderbox plug — the fact that I’d been playing in my course file early in term and had decided to track how each activity either taught, practiced or evaluated a ministerial objective proved to be a godsend. As I entered this information, it really could not have seemed more pointless: these basic governmental requirements are so basic that they take care of themselves in most courses. But in the current situation, being able to see plainly what had already been taught and evaluated allowed me to very quickly identify what remained to be done. If this information hadn’t already been readily visible in the links of my course map, the rabbit holes I would have fallen into and the herrings (red) I would have chased as I tried to figure out how to plan the abbreviated final weeks of the semester are quite literally innumerable.