Preparing for a Remote Fall

It was no surprise when my institution finally officially announced that the Fall semester will begin remotely. The language leaves open a pivot to in-person classes, but that will depend among other things on state and county guidelines. Earlier in the summer, as cases were dying down in late May and early June, I was very much looking forward to in-person meetings with my students. And although I have been expecting that we would be all-remote since early July as cases surged, I still felt oddly deflated by the official announcement. And I can no longer procrastinate over class prep.

 

Classes begin in two weeks. Most of my class prep time the past two weeks was for my special topics origin-of-life course. Since I expected we would go remote, I have returned to using our institution’s LMS. Regular readers will know I’m not a fan of Blackboard, but if I want to do my best this coming semester, I will need to utilize its features for online engagement and security. (I normally use my own bare-bones, but efficient, HTML course website.) Also, the look and feel is also different because we’ve upgraded to Blackboard Ultra, a minor annoyance. Being all-remote means I will need to make the online atmosphere welcoming and engaging, without being too burdensome. So I spent some time designing the look and feel of my course, and I’m pleased with the results. Here’s a snapshot of the landing page.

 

I need to do a bit more editing before releasing the page for student consumption later this week. However, to start engagement before class begins, I e-mailed a brief welcome to my students and shared with them links to my recent post on Silicon Life and our library’s link to the e-Book that we’ll be reading and discussing as part of the course. No one has dropped the class yet (since the all-remote announcement) so that’s a good sign, I suppose. We’ll be primarily discussing the primary literature in class (over Zoom). I’ve figured out the syllabus and collected all the readings. For online engagement, the students will blog and contribute to the discussion board.

 

This week I’m starting to work intensely on two fronts. I have twenty new first-year advisees, and I have been looking at their course schedules, transfer credit, and planning for the advising meetings we will be having starting a week from today. In parallel I am starting to put together my G-Chem course (that these twenty students are also enrolled in). We’ve switched textbooks again. I was on sabbatical last year and did not participate in the discussion. I have a slight preference for the textbook we were using previously (I think it is better written and arranges the topics more suitably to my approach) but the companion e-Homework system was more problematic. We’re back to a system I have some familiarity with, but also has differences because it has been upgraded (another minor annoyance).

 

I will also need to make arrangements to get new research students set up remotely. I don’t anticipate a problem setting up student accounts on our local high-performance computing cluster or getting them VPN access. I will have to figure out how to do the ‘training’ remotely. Usually, I spent two days carefully walking the students through the ins and outs of Linux, using a text editor, and using our specific computational chemistry software. This will not be as smooth in a remote setting, but it’s nowhere as problematic as running an experimental ‘wet’ lab. So I’m thankful for that fateful day when a professor in graduate school made his research group sound so interesting that I decided (with little experience) to join his group and try out computational chemistry. I taught myself Irix (SGI’s version of Unix) and a scripting language on the fly, and I haven’t looked back since.

 

I haven’t sorted through how I feel about a potential pivot back to in-person classes. While I personally would prefer it (and I’ve considered the potential risks), I don’t think it would be practical for a variety of reasons. Having never taught remotely/online and missing the harsh pivot last spring, I’m trying to look at the bright side: I’m acquiring some new skills, and these might enhance my teaching in the long run. We’ll see how long this run is.