Teaching online

This spring term I am teaching one course - History of Science and Technology - which I was very much looking forward to. Now it had to be put online almost overnight. On Friday, March 5th, the guidelines still said that teaching goes on as normal, on Monday, March 6th, it was decided that all teaching has to be online. On March 7, it was our first classroom meeting, which now had to be taken online overnight.

Teaching online is not really a new thing to me. I taught Landscape Semiotics at the University of Tartu 100% online between 2007-2010 and 50% online between 2010 and 2012, long before today’s Zoom appeared. Even got an award for it. One thing that these years taught me, is that online courses take so much more work than normal seminar-based courses. It is so easy to overdo assignments, and yet you have to build in a reading comprehension check everywhere, you need to constantly see that people hand in all they need by the time they need to. These days, it is particularly demanding: students may fall ill, others have been called back by the home universities half way into the term, and then I need to build in a possibility for myself to fall really ill and not be able to do anything. It has taken some work to get this running but all in all I think it is fun. Some of the topics, such as health and theories of contagion, or science denial are more urgent than ever.

To avoid people on the other side of the zoom screen from getting distracted by my wall or kids who flash by, I have set up a digital background: a cool picture that I took of the Esperanza base in this February. It felt quite professional to speak about the post-WWII financing of big science and the development of climate science on the background of an Antarctic base.

Applause to everyone who can keep concentrated during the endless Zoom meetings. I can’t keep my eyes off other people’s bookshelves,. for example. To hide mine, I’ve put up this screen. If I’m boring, you can try and count the penguins.