Emergency Remote Teaching

Watching the spread of Covid-19 and its potential disruption to schools and universities is giving me pause. I’m not personally affected by precautionary regulations since I’m on sabbatical and not teaching. However, large classes at the institution I’m visiting have moved to online delivery; smaller classes are still meeting face-to-face. I’m sitting in on a small biochemistry class, where attendance is now taken in case contact tracing is required. The university has also been offering a slew of Zoom courses for faculty members.

What’s giving me pause is whether I would be prepared to switch to remote teaching if there was a health crisis or some other emergency, potentially lasting for weeks or months. I have on rare occasion missed a class or two. If so, it’s usually because I’m attending a conference, although feeling sufficiently unwell would also do it. I try not to travel when classes are in session because I don’t like missing class, and for the most part my body subconsciously waits for the break to break down and fall ill.

My department has an emergency backup teaching plan for our high enrollment multiple-section courses such as general chemistry. I’ve subbed for my colleagues when they were out sick or traveling, and they’ve done the same for me. Some folks opt to cover their own classes with some online approach with video and discussion. But all these are typically one-off occasions – my colleagues and I prefer (I think) to be with our classes in person; that’s why we’re teaching at a liberal arts college. I’m a proponent of live relational learning, and chemistry is a challenging subject to learn even in the best of circumstances.

I maintain my course websites which contain detailed information and some materials for delivery, although I’ve never done a video-lecture. One of my courses (P-Chem 2) has detailed fill-in-the-blanks handouts for every class session because I do not use a textbook. It should be fairly straightforward for me to do video-capture for that class, or any of my classes, although I would need to learn and practice. I’d be more inclined to write out my lecture notes in full and add annotations before sending them to my students – I think this would be more effective but I don’t know for sure. One year (in the old days), I gave out photocopies of my P-Chem notes to students before class, in the hope that not having to maniacally write in class, they could concentrate on my explanations. I’m not sure there was much effect, except some students skipped class more often.

If, as I believe, a core aspect of teaching is my relationship with students, then I expect that in a Covid-like crisis, I would still regularly meet and discuss things with my students over Zoom, Facebook or other platforms. I think my students and I would both appreciate live Q&A, rather than asynchronous back-and-forth e-mails. Chemical structures, equations with symbols/sub/superscripts, and visual schemes, would likely communicate better through video – along with accompanying audio explanations. It’s no fun being isolated or quarantined, so I’m thankful for today’s technology that allows for (virtual) interpersonal communication.

For institutions as a whole, being affected by Covid-19 brings greater challenges. On top of instructional issues, residential colleges with students living on campus present even greater challenges – from additional cleaning to changes in dining services. On the university administration front, splitting your teams so that half the group is telecommuting at any one time is a standard operating procedure to minimize risk in these circumstances. Here’s a link to the CDC interim guidance to higher education institutes on Covid-19. On top of that, having to combat fake news, panic, xenophobic attitudes; all of this presents quite the challenge. My worries about online emergency teaching are a small drop in the bucket; but it’s better to think ahead and be prepared. I’ve been forewarned.