Seen on Twitter

quote:

Quick shout of solidarity to any university colleagues on here who also become academics because they liked reading books and writing essays, and were probably a bit of a geek, and who now find themselves doing the equivalent of hosting a live tv cable channel every day instead

I have a bunch of favorite academics who could make that claim. They often have tens of thousands of followers.

Some examples:

Susan Dynarski (formerly Michigan, now Harvard)

Sara Goldrick-Rab (sociologist at Temple)

Tom Nichols (wrote The Death of Expertise, teaches at the Naval War College)

etc. ....

I didn't take that to be the point. I took it to mean doing online instruction every day.

I'm not having to do the live TV cable channel thing at the moment, although it looks like I'll have one or more classes to teach in that mode in the spring or summer.

Between a tutorial, some independent studies, and a graduate assistant, I meet individually by Zoom with twelve students a week. It feels more like doing therapy telemedicine-style than hosting a TV show. I think I do my best teaching one-on-one, when it's just me and my student talking about how to improve their work. It would be nice if all writing education was taught in that style, but the economics of it don't add up.

My other class is asynchronous distance learning, so my students read and write on their own, they get written feedback from me on their work in writing, and then we do the usual class discussion, only it's conducted on a class forum.

In other words, it's like spending time here!!!!!

I've been training for this since (checking my registration date) 2005!

quote:

who now find themselves doing the equivalent of hosting a live tv cable channel every day instead

One of my friends told me she taught her first "hyflex" class this week. She said it was horrible and she felt like a standup comedian slowly dying on stage because every.single.joke.falls.flat.

For anyone who doesn't remember, hyflex is the (pedagogically and technologically ridiculous) model where the teacher and some students are physically together in the classroom and the rest of the students are synchronously participating in the class via Zoom.

I have yet to hear from anyone who has experienced both hyflex and standard remote-synchronous teaching who thinks that the hyflex is useful or better than remote-sync...

sorry, bit of thread drift...

quote:

Originally posted by Mary Anna:
In other words, it's like spending time here!!!!!

I've been training for this since (checking my registration date) 2005!

That's awesome!


I am teaching remote-sync, it's fine. I did an anonymous survey of my students to try to see if there were any significant problems that I am missing, but everyone who responded said it's going really well and a lot of students said that it's very, very close to a regular in-person class.

So that's good.

Actually, if I may toot my own horn a bit, I got my annual review from AY 2019-2020, and among other things, my chair wrote "Dr. SK was one of the most successful professors to move online" and included a whole bunch of C&Ps from my student evals. So that was nice!

quote:

Originally posted by jon-nyc:
I didn't take that to be the point. I took it to mean doing online instruction every day.

I saw the Twitter reference and then ran in the wrong direction.

Remote synchronous is working just fine for me. Don't know about how it's working for them, but ...

Actually, like SK I'm not getting any negative feedback about the delivery mode. I'm signed up to do it this way again in the spring.

quote:

not getting any negative feedback about the delivery mode

I think remote sync or async are fine. It's the hyflex method that's a problem. (Although, based on students' comments in my survey, there are probably more than a few teachers who just can't figure out some of the most basic tech things, like sharing a PPT on Zoom, putting students into breakout rooms....

BTW I signed up for remote-sync in spring as well. Whew.

A lot of this experience requires us to work in the dark. Are they learning? Are they happy with the experience? It's hard to tell.

However, I got an email from a graduate student in my asynchronous class yesterday, telling me that my work in that class was an inspiration to him as he teaches as part of an assistantship in another department (Film Studies). He specifically said nice things about my approach to teaching through participation on the class forum.

So I'll just say it again: I've been training for this moment since 2005.

MA, nice!

And good for you that you're getting recognition for your online teaching from students and from your chair!

Not that it means very much, but I will tell you that Zimmer tells me he is doing seven classes online at the college where he teaches. He says it’s very, very difficult, it takes up all his time, and he feels bad that he is not able to make each class what he would like it to be.

On the other hand Covid has given him time at home such that he has been able to build structures for the raising of chickens and separating them from his retired racing greyhound so there is that.

Thanks MA!

quote:

I will tell you that Zimmer tells me he is doing seven classes online at the college where he teaches. He says it’s very very difficult and it takes up all his time and he feels bad that he is not able to make each class what he would like it to be.

Steve, wow! seven classes online is a lot!! Do you know if he's doing sync, async or a mix?

Online teaching (done well or even to a bare minimum kind of level) takes waaaay more time than in-person teaching, almost across the board. That is probably the thing that frustrates me the most these days.

Steve, please give my best to RZ!