Switching from F2F to Online Teaching due to Coronavirus

Due to “an abundance of caution”—about Covid 19 aka coronavirus—my university has switched face to classes over to online for the coming weeks. I have been thinking about this shift for a few weeks, and actively working on this shift since I saw the email four hours ago. Maybe some professors get paid enough for this, but junior faculty at public teaching institutions don’t, to say nothing of contingent faculty. 

Making the switch elegantly would take far more time than I have, but even switching inelegantly makes the importance of medium so clear. This is abundantly obvious to anyone who has converted a F2F course to online, or, say concerted a recipe designed for roasting in an oven so that it would work as a freezer meal for an Instant Pot. Since I believe that we should “cancel everything,” I think this tremendous workload is worth it. 

But I can’t help but be sad about what will inevitably be lost in the shift: student presentations that typically lead to students actually asking classmates if they have feedback on tricky points or if they have questions (without my intervention ! It’s beautiful!) will be cancelled. Moments of discovery that emerge because of a particular classroom dynamic and semi-off-topic comment will never happen. In meeting the reality of the situation, sometimes shifts like this are necessary.

In meeting the reality of the fact that people have to eat dinner every day (why!?!), it can be worth it to turn your crispy roasted potatoes and whatever into a risky stew, and maybe an apricot jam broth is a pretty awesome idea after all. In meeting the reality of a unknown pandemic, I’m hopeful that some great and unexpected moments of discovery will happen for me and my students. 

This isn’t a referendum on online learning, or the thoughtful people who teach online well, but we should probably also remind ourselves and those around us that living online is not a solution to everything, even as it opens doors and provides options we need right now.