Moving to online learning after spring break

A week has passed after spring break, but none of my classmates, professors, and other staff has set foot on campus again, not only in Georgetown, but in many if not all colleges and K-12 schools all over the US, maybe even the world.

Transitioning to online classes shouldn’t be a struggle. I’ve had work from home and remote work arrangements before. And our classes – part of a graduate program in learning, design, and technology – are not foreign to remote and virtual learning environments. Online learning should be coming naturally, both in theory and practice. Just last week, I sent in a mid-term paper on online learning and Biesta’s purposes of education.

But there I was missing assignment deadlines and appreciating the fact that some of my professors have dialed back on assigning readings this past week. Perhaps it was from finishing a paper over spring break. Or more likely, I’ve put priority on shadowing colleagues as we held office hours during work days for faculty. Then I picked up shifts for office hours to assist faculty move their teaching online and work their way around Canvas and Zoom, via Zoom.

I didn’t plan to work over the break, having looked forward to it only three weeks in the new semester. But I saw it coming. My office has been holding meetings days before the break, bracing for the onslaught of this monstrous wave, watching it from the opposite shore as it approached our way. It arrived by way of an email from the university president, first for a couple of weeks, and later for the rest of the semester.

Most faculty will have taught their first classes post-spring break by now. The classes are by no means expected to be perfect versions of their classroom counterpart. Debates are still going on in education institutions whether to shift to pass or fail, synchronous or asynchronous, or whether to continue or stop teaching altogether in this unsettling time. 

I looked forward to my classes this past week, a welcome diversion that gave me the slightest sense of normalcy, where for a couple of hours we were able to gather and see familiar faces to talk about learning, higher education, education technology, their confluence and multifaceted challenges, as we have been doing in the past seven months. It wasn’t much of a form of escape. It was a short circuit in our graduate program, and the world, as we are now living through the very topics and challenges in higher ed that we have been discussing all along.