Redeeming the Time: Teaching Online in the Plague Year

We are all online now.

Our job, professors, is not to create – in one week! — a robust online course that can somehow approximate the rigor and dynamism of our face to face classes.

Our job is to help our students salvage what remains of their academic year.  They have taken out loans and paid tuition and bought books. They need these credits for their general education requirements, or for their major, or to fulfill their elective requirements.  They did not sign up for an online course; they expected to finish their semester in the classroom.  We certainly did not sign up to teach an online course.  But here we are.

What to do?

Some universities and colleges have already informed their faculty that, when classes resume, they are to hold real-time class meetings online via Zoom.  This is an impracticable directive because it makes all kinds of assumptions about the home situations of both students and faculty.  Many students do not have reliable internet access at home, nor do they have unlimited data plans that would allow them to stream video for extended periods of time.  I know this because I don’t live under a rock, and I know because I just surveyed my own students about what kind of online setup they will have accessible to them.  (I have posted my seven survey questions over at my own blog.)

So far I have multiple students in each class who are concerned about bandwidth issues, and multiple students who are concerned about the fact that their own children are home with them and need care/supervision – because all the school districts are closed – and so they may not be able to meet during our normal class time.

At the same time, some students have expressed a wish to continue trying to have a class that is as “normal” as possible, with some approximation of face to face discussion, because they learn best that way.  Some have said our primary source discussions are their favorite part of the class.  And they will lose something really important if the class becomes “a to-do list on Canvas.”

Class must not become a to-do list on Canvas.

Class must be a respite from the worries of our world, for my students and for myself.

So what to do?

Here’s what I’m doing.

Following my own guidance from a widely-circulated twitter thread, I’m making it simple in terms of what I will require in the way of submitted work:  keep taking the reading quizzes as usual, use the discussion board to talk about a primary source, and so forth. Low bandwidth, low stress assignments.

In terms of what I will offer to the students as a meager substitute for the dynamism and fun of an in-person class:  recorded video snippets of yours truly making key points that I would normally convey in lecture, a synchronous (and optional) online audio/video discussion held during the time when our class would normally meet, virtual office hours via Skype, and a gracious and generous approach to grading.

In lieu of the semester-long research project that some of my classes are working on, I’m going to ask them to do two things.  First, I am asking all of them to keep a daily journal, old school, pen on paper.  My youngest son is – thank God — out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean right now, on a two-month science research mission surveying the sea life and mineral content of the ocean floor.  When his supervisor sent the list of required supplies for the mission, he included on that list a journal and pens or pencils.  The supervisor made clear that one of my son’s daily tasks will be to write something – anything, one sentence – daily in a journal.  It’s a matter of mental hygiene when you’re at sea for weeks and weeks, his supervisor said, a way of clearing your head and processing your experience.  It’s valuable in the moment for how it helps you routinize and decompress, and it will be valuable later for future work in the field.  No one is going to read the journal but my son, but he must consider it part of his daily duties to maintain it.

So I will ask this of my students: keep a daily journal. They will not be turning that in.  It is purely for their own benefit.  One sentence a day is sufficient – I will not be checking.  But I will encourage them to mark the days in this way, and I will give them credit for completing the assignment if they tell me they have done so.

And as a project that they will submit for their final exam, I will ask them to create a (virtual) commonplace book of primary sources from our moment that those oft-invoked “future historians” could use to understand how we in this time are experiencing a pandemic.  This digital commonplace book could include anything from viral memes to video clips from press conferences to conspiracy theories circulating on social media to Washington Post articles.  I will ask them to choose items that are connected with themes we have been exploring during the course, and I will ask them to explain why they chose what they chose and what challenges their sources might pose for future historians.

And that’s it.

None of us signed up for this, and none of us need to be troubled or distressed or under duress because we are all expected to pivot on a moment’s notice to a completely different kind of teaching and learning.

What we need is kindness, and understanding, and grace, for our students and for ourselves – and certainly for our administrators, who are worried about what accreditors are going to see when they look at this semester. (Note to accrediting agencies, to the US Department of Education, to the state boards of higher education:  for heaven’s sake, we all need a hall pass this semester.  Issue waivers like you’re throwing a ticker-tape parade.  If you’re not worried about how Harvard and Stanford and Georgetown are maintaining rigor, don’t worry about the rest of us either.  We are all doing our best.)

Lucky for us, we are humanists, and we teach in a discipline that is shaped at every turn by ethical and moral questions.  We grapple at every step with the meaning people have made in their times, of their times, and what all those things might mean to us in our own time.  We may not be ready for online teaching – do you think I have any interest in seeing myself on HD video? – but we are as ready as anyone to help our students face this moment and learn something from it together.  Lord, teach us so to number our days that we may present to thee a heart of wisdom.

We are all online now. Let us be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving, understanding, gracious, generous. Let us redeem the time, because the days are evil.