All change

Ooooooo-kay!

So – it has been most interesting – and not a little nervous making – watching the walls slowly pressing in towards us. This was not how it was meant to be.

I am of course referring to the ongoing and increasingly immediate COVID-19 pandemic crisis.

It has been hard enough watching the headless chickens (however much one might acknowledge their anxieties) stripping the stores of comestibles, but it is sometimes difficult not to roll one’s eyes. As reports filtered back to me of frantic hordes in Costco loading up their outsized trolleys with toilet paper and emptying the racks in the process I was eyeing up shelves groaning with said same items in our local store.

Of more immediate concern has been the situation at the College. There are but three weeks or so of this term remaining – and I do not teach in the summer term. As governments and authorities have taken each faltering and uncertain step towards total social isolation – shutdown in any other language – so the odds have been shrinking of us getting to the end of term without having to step back from classroom teaching.

Well – now that point has been reached. The College remains open but there is a ban on face to face teaching. What this means is that we have to find alternative methods of delivering classroom teaching materials, running lab sessions and assignments and of handling the all important examinations.

The College is well enough equipped with appropriate technology. We have a slightly eccentric but quite usable learning platform and tools for creating and disseminating distance learning materials. The issue is not with the technology. The problem is with the time and effort that must now be put into converting materials meant for face to face delivery in the lecture theatre to online only form. Given that I had still to finish the necessary items for the last few lectures of this new(ish) course anyway I now have double the work to do.

The likelihood is that not everything will run smoothly. Mistakes will be made. Things will go awry. As the students’ education is at stake – for which they have, of course, paid not insubstantial fees – such things matter.

Finger firmly crossed on all fronts? Here we go…!