TITLE: Going Online, Two Weeks In
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: April 03, 2020  2:05 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:

 Earlier in the week I read
<A HREF="https://m.signalvnoise.com/working-remotely-builds-organizational-resiliency/">
   this article</A>
 by Jason Fried and circled these sentences:
<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Ultimately this major upheaval is an opportunity.  This is a chance
 for your company, your teams, and individuals to learn a new skill.
 Working remotely is a skill.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 After two weeks of the great COVID-19 school-from-home adventure,
 I very much believe that teaching remotely is a skill -- one I do
 not yet have.

 Last week I shared a few thoughts about
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2020-03.html#e2020-03-27T14_31_19.htm">
   my first week teaching online</A>.
 I've stopped thinking of this as "teaching online", though, because
 my course was not designed as an online course.  It was pushed
 online, like so many courses everywhere, in a state of emergency.
 The result is a course that has been optimized over many years for
 face-to-face synchronous interaction being taken by students mostly
 asynchronously, without much face-to-face interaction.

 My primary emotion after my second week teaching remotely is
 disappointment.  Switching to this new mode of instruction was simple
 but not easy, at least not easy to do well.  It was simple because I
 already have so much textual material available online, including
 detailed lecture notes.  For students who can read the class notes,
 do exercises and homework problems, ask a few questions, and learn
 on their own, things seem to be going fine so far.  (I'll know more
 as more work comes in for evaluation.)  But approximately half of my
 students need more, and I have not figured out yet how best to serve
 them well.

 I've now hosted four class sessions via Zoom for students who were
 available at class time and interested or motivated enough to show
 up.  With the exception of one student, they all keep their video
 turned off, which offers me little or no visual feedback.  Everyone
 keeps their audio turned off except when speaking, which is great
 for reducing the distraction of noises from everybody's homes and
 keyboards.  The result, though, is an eerie silence that leaves me
 feeling as if I'm talking to myself in a big empty room.  As I
 told my students on Thursday, it's a bit unnerving.

 With so little perceptual stimulus, time seems to pass quickly, at
 least for me.  It's easy to talk for far too long.  I'm spared a bit
 by the fact that my classes intersperse short exposition by me with
 interactive work: I set them a problem, they work for a while, and
 then we debrief.  This sort of session, though, requires the students
 to be engaged and up to date with their reading and homework.  That's
 hard for me to expect of them under the best of conditions, let alone
 now when they are dispersed and learning to cope with new distractions.

 After a few hours of trying to present material online, I very much
 believe that this activity requires skill and experience, of which
 I have little of either at this point.  I have a lot of work to do.
 I hope to make Fried proud and use this as an opportunity to learn
 new skills.

 I had expected by this point to have created more short videos that
 I could use to augment my lecture notes, for students who have no
 choice but to work on the course whenever they are free.  Time has
 been in short supply, though, with everything on campus changing all
 at once.  Perhaps if I can make a few more videos and flip the course
 a bit more, I will both serve those students better and find a path
 toward using our old class time better for the students who show up
 then and deserve a positive learning experience.

 At level of nuts and bolts, I have already begun to learn some of
 the details of Panopto, Zoom, and our e-learning system.  I like
 learning new tools, though the complications of learning them all
 at once and trying to use them at the same time makes me feel like
 a tech newbie.  I guess that never changes.

 The good news is that other parts of the remote work experience are
 going better, sometimes even well.  Many administrative meetings work
 fine on Zoom, because they are mostly about people sharing information
 and reporting out.  Most don't really need to be meetings anyway, and
 participating via Zoom is an improvement over gathering in a big room.
 As one administrator said
<A HREF="https://twitter.com/wallingf/status/1242098226829950977">
   at the end of one meeting recently</A>,
 "This was the first council meeting online and maybe the shortest
 council meeting ever."  I call that a success.
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