Urgh

[branchandroot]

*crawls back onto the internet like a small animal onto one of those life-saving pool floats, bedraggled and wild-eyed, and lies there panting*

Oh my god, you guys, the entire world of education is losing its collective mind. Every week there's a different decision about what we're going to do for Fall. Faculty are frantic. Students are frantic. Engineering is going full throttle to get the new recording/streaming tech into 268 teaching spaces in the span of four weeks. If we actually wind up fully online, they're probably going to hunt down the Uni president and strangle him with ethernet cable, and no jury in the land would convict them. My instructional designers are running flat out trying to help all the instructors figure out WTF they're going to do about fall courses and cornering like mo-fos every time directives change, and I just hope nobody wipes out. I'm madly writing website pages of recommendations and directions and guidance, because no one else has time to, I think my fingers are going to fall off, and if the Support Services director says one more word about making every content page a knowledgebase article in the ticketing system I swear I'm going to put out a hit on him. Also, I have three, possibly four, new tools lined up to pilot because everyone keeps screaming about the inadequacy of the discussion tools (they're not wrong), and while it's gratifying to have vendors line up to kiss my toes it's also /very wearing to arrange all this/.

My counterpart over in the Med School had a bottle of tequila hand-delivered to my door when I agreed to help get her prospective iClicker specialist up to speed. It's just that kind of world right now.

I've had to leave off coffee completely, lest I never be ulcer-free. My current coping mechanism is to finally replace my tea-brewing equipment in glass, like I've been meaning to, and audition new teas for my collection. My kitchen counter is a positive riot of color-coded tea canisters. It's feeding my need for /some/ order in my life, at any rate.

And of course this is the time that the "yes, but what about Qin Su" bunny decides to come chew on my ankle. *hands* Because why not.

...actually, Qin Su is a little terrifying, when you catch her right. Madam Jin is about to acquire a student.

Comments

[ilyena_sylph]

+hugs gently+

We're having similar meltdowns at mine.

I'm mostly isolated from it via working in the library (and backstage in the library at that), but it's... it's not good.

[branchandroot]

*leans* I bet. Take care of yourself; things are reaching the stage where offices are trying to offload preparation tasks onto each other like it was zucchini they could sneak into someone else's car on the sly, in fall. Video Services tried to palm off clip-creation onto the Media Library just last week.

[edenfalling]

*sympathy hugs*

The knock-on effects in the student housing market are also wild and crazy and all over the place, but not nearly to that degree. I have been coping mostly by listening to podcasts, drinking more alcohol than is probably wise, and pretending very hard that nothing new can change/go wrong while I'm asleep.

[branchandroot]

*hugs* Oh man, I just bet. So may delayed leases. Maybe even broken leases, if the Unis flop back to fully online. Ugh.

[cathexys]

If we actually wind up fully online, they're probably going to hunt down the Uni president and strangle him with ethernet cable, and no jury in the land would convict them. Couldn't help but laugh!

My biggest concern atm, is that my class is double the size of the classroom capacity and they expect me to somehow fix it.... (I know, ideally they'd record it in the classroom and have it online for the other half, but...we won't be equipped). I asked the students to be online only (which I have tom plan for anyway), but they want F2F...so that puts all the extra work and creating alternative teaching plans simultaneously on me. For 2500/semester that's a bit ridiculous!

(And of course because a pandemic isn't enough, we've also changed our LMS. So everything I'd created in the spring I have to redo plus, of course, learning the system and creating the online classes and...

I've been thinking about you a lot in the past few weeks...

All the hugs!!!

[branchandroot]

o_o

o_O

O_O THEY CHANGED YOUR LMS THIS SUMMER?!

*hugs back* Good lord, and I thought Director Dingbat rolling out a new ticketing system for the help desk this summer was the height of idiocy. That's... that's a /special/ level of WTF.

We have a lot of instructors in just your situation, yeah. We're all trying to figure out how having half the class on-site at a time will work best, and asking you to switch half your content out to asynchronous so the other half of the class has something to /do/ on their off day for that piddling little money ON A NEW LMS is... *emphatic hand gestures*

I'll be your alibi, if you need, let's say that!

[sylvaine]

Ooof. *hugs* right now over here everyone in charge seems determined that Everything Will Go Back To Normal after the holidays, despite evidence to the contrary, so I can only imagine the scramble people will have to do last minute. :/

[branchandroot]

*winces* Oh man, that will be a mess for sure. *hugsback*

[synecdochic]

♥ I am deeply amused by your counterpart delivering tequila to you. I hope y'all can at least get some solid answers soon so you're not having to redo everything every 30 seconds :/

[branchandroot]

A-fucking-men to that. *takes another swig of tequila*

[niqaeli]

I have been thinking of you lots as my SIL wrangles with her university transitioning to APA7 in the midst of this shitshow. The university in question was already far and away primarily online learning, but still.

(She is very stressed. Unsurprisingly.)

Strength and fortitude to you, and also, uh, what IS your favourite form of alcohol? >_>

[branchandroot]

*whistles* I bet she is. This edition was a big jump esp the "grammar" side.

Thank you, and you too! Brainweasels suck.

*laughing* Absolutely tequila, since I can't have tannins at the mo. I'm rebuilding my collection of sipping tequilas.

[niqaeli]

Funny story, the grammar changes--profound as they are--are actually the least of her worries (although the rest of my household are all sort of curious who the fuck it is that has a hard-on of en-dashes). The changes in how they handle certain citations are actually what's driving her around the twist. Well, that and the fact that there's been Departmental Politics which is what landed her the whole of this mess in the first place.

(She's a librarian, she handles all the online guides the library offers. Her job was theoretically supposed to be writing the guides, but it's actually writing the guides and doing all the webmaster work for them. When she got the transfer to this position, she was... less than thrilled to discover her promotion had been to front web dev, heh. I've patted her hand a lot re: CSS. Anyway, ordinarily, she wouldn't have been handling ALL of the transition to APA, just the citations, but ahahaha. Her Grand Boss got annoyed with the other departments involved in this whole debacle--not without reason, to be fair--and the net result was SIL got stuck with trying to deal with a batshit amount of work on a batshit timeframe, with only a part-time minion to her name.)

[branchandroot]

Oh god, /never/ let on you can do web dev; you wind up doing all of it, and they never let you go, because it's "omg, coding!" to the non-techies, but "mere layout" to the techies. Give her some tequila in my name.

[ephemera]

For all the longer-term existential threat that it represents, some part of me is relieved that we don't have students this semester, and I'm not currently climbing this particular cliff-face - all strength to your elbow, and alcohol of choice for all!

[branchandroot]

*toasts you* Yeah, a bit part of me wishes the admin had faced down the threat of 1/3 of the students taking a year off and just said we'll do all-online.