Here’s what I’ve learned in less than three days of teaching a class online:
- It is abundantly far more difficult to video a deck of slides than I had asked for or imagined.
- Corollary: twice my usual last minute, so what I thought would be the last couple of minutes, which is twice what I normally allow for course preparation, turns out to be not even half enough last minute. More like the last 20 seconds.
- Trying not to get my video account disabled for violating copyright [because I have never been that careful about the images I use for powerpoint presentations I’m only going to show in class, because seriously who would even care, only now they’re going to be on the internet so …] by putting passwords on the videos, so they would only available to the students in the class, which to my mind made them seem more like “fair use” would apply, just to be on the safe side, probably does make me look like a pornographer to robots. [And yes, I probably should have thought of that earlier.]
- Looking like a pornographer to robots will trigger the video hosting service into cancelling my account. Which was what I was trying to avoid in the first place.
- This will make it impossible for the students to watch those videos of the lecture slides.
Qohelet, as usual, is correct: “what is lacking cannot be counted.” This probably goes double for what I don’t know about teaching online.
Hopefully less will be lacking as time goes on.
Notes on Jeremiah 21 WILL appear before the end of the week … I had hoped for today, until the whole looking like a pornographer to robots thing forced me to revise my timeline, so maybe not today after all.
Matters of Interpretation 