What’s the best online course you’ve ever taken?
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When COVID hit during Spring Term 2020, we all had to pivot to online teaching. Classes were all synchronous, of course, at that time, and almost none of us knew what the hell we were doing. The ed tech department cobbled together some last-minute thing (a course to be completed online, natch) for the early weeks of summer break to prepare us all for fully online courses Fall Term, and it was a bitch. In a matter of weeks, we had to convert a course we’d be teaching to a completely different format, and it was time-consuming and exhausting. I love computers, have since they came into the workplace in the ’70s, but I still found some of the tech (like accessibility–that stuff was not user-friendly at that time) challenging. To say the least. And with chronic fatigue, the sheer demands in time and energy were a bit much as well! But we had great teachers, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and supportive.
I learned so-o-o much, and got such good feedback about the course I designed that I did feel confident, even excited, about fall term.
I never went back to the classroom. Between the university’s refusal to do anything to mitigate, even forbidding vulnerable faculty to ask students to mask in our own damn offices, and the stupid guns-on-campus law the state had passed a couple of years before on the one hand, and my increasing age/advancing disability on the other, online teaching turned out to be a refuge for me. I had thought I’d never do it because the interpersonal is so vital to good teaching, and I did miss the classroom, but. Online teaching would be my ‘bag’ for the next six years.
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