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ahahahaha ha
Mar. 23rd, 2020 03:47 pmSo, the university responded to the Michigan stay-at-home order by declaring that SPRING AND SUMMER classes will be fully online!
Recall, Umich in general and LSA in particular has zero support for online classes, zero preparation, zero faculty experience. Academic Innovation has, heretofore, been this weird little office that specializes in MOOCs and sometimes gets suddenly asked for way more help than they have people or materials to do by one of the professional grad programs.
But suddenly! All online courses, for Spring and Summer terms!
*makes mad little jazz-hands gestures, indicative of a powerful urge to rip someone's head off*
So! I'll just be over here condensing the whole twenty pages of the QM rubric into a two-page handout of recommendations. As one does. Ahaha.
*screams into a pillow*
Recall, Umich in general and LSA in particular has zero support for online classes, zero preparation, zero faculty experience. Academic Innovation has, heretofore, been this weird little office that specializes in MOOCs and sometimes gets suddenly asked for way more help than they have people or materials to do by one of the professional grad programs.
But suddenly! All online courses, for Spring and Summer terms!
*makes mad little jazz-hands gestures, indicative of a powerful urge to rip someone's head off*
So! I'll just be over here condensing the whole twenty pages of the QM rubric into a two-page handout of recommendations. As one does. Ahaha.
*screams into a pillow*
One week down, almost all online
Mar. 21st, 2020 02:38 pmI have made it through the week, and without even trying to strangle any of our instructors through the ethernet wires! In the course of a week and a half the uni has: stopped in-person classes, tried to send most staff remote without actually closing campus, turfed the students out of dorms and back home, acquired a second paid subscription for videoconferencing (Zoom on top of Bluejeans, and they'll be paying for Conferences soon if I have to hold a knife on the end of a six-foot stick to them to do it), and declared pass/no-record grading. I have answered avalanches of email with really basic instructions that are already posted on the teaching remotely webpages I wrote two weeks ago.
Next major step: haul the remaining 100 or so instructors who are still coming to campus to lecture to empty seats so as to be recorded by our Lecture Capture system, out of the goddamn classrooms. Hopefully /before/ the state lockdown order comes through. Kaltura Capture is not /hard/, it's about three clicks on your computer to record and two more to upload, but you'd think we were asking them to do surgery or something.
That's for next week, though! Now is the weekend! Now is the time for a pile of really indulgent home-made nachos and a twelve ounce margarita!
Next major step: haul the remaining 100 or so instructors who are still coming to campus to lecture to empty seats so as to be recorded by our Lecture Capture system, out of the goddamn classrooms. Hopefully /before/ the state lockdown order comes through. Kaltura Capture is not /hard/, it's about three clicks on your computer to record and two more to upload, but you'd think we were asking them to do surgery or something.
That's for next week, though! Now is the weekend! Now is the time for a pile of really indulgent home-made nachos and a twelve ounce margarita!
Umich, how so brainless?
Mar. 14th, 2020 01:44 pm*crawls out of the hell-pit of this week*
Ugh. I mean ugh.
So, yes, hi. This week, Umich finally decided to move classes online. This happened in the form of a message on WEDNESDAY saying that classes were cancelled for the last two days of the week to give faculty time to shift to online. It didn't have a smiley emoji on the end, but you could tell it would have if the uni president knew how to add one.
Umich, and ESPECIALLY the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, which employs me, is a wholly residential school. It prides itself on being a residential school, with the residential experience, and only a smattering of online programs at the graduate level in the professional Colleges. When I say that the university is utterly, abysmally, unspeakably unprepared to do any online teaching whatsoever, I am understating the case by about a thousand percent.
Nevertheless! Four whole days, to prepare to go wholly online!
I should, perhaps, mention that my unit, all seven of us, are the ones who would be responsible for online education at LSA (all 20,000 students and 4,000 instructors worth of LSA), supposing there was any online education, which there isn't. If you think this means there are exactly two of us (one of them me) who are in any way prepared to support the (4,000) faculty in this, you would be correct.
Now, I saw this coming last week, and have been writing webpages of recommendations and resources like a madwoman to get them up in time, and I made it by the skin of my teeth, but of course then the entire goddamn College ignored that advice to attempt to almost ALL hold class by videoconference. Never having done so before. In the middle of the whole rest of the country trying to do the same thing. I'm sure you can imagine how well this is going so far, and we haven't even had actual classes that way yet.
So, my boss is losing her mind, my team is losing their minds, my faculty are losing their minds, and it wasn't until Friday that the uni president finally, finally caved in and said non-essential staff should go remote too.
Non-essential staff only, mind you. The University isn't closing. Oh no. My parent unit is still responsible for assisting all those instructors who want to come in and use their classrooms as usual to lecture to empty seats and be recorded with Lecture Capture, and call it teaching. So, the rest of Technology Services is losing their minds also.
But I and my team, at least, will now be able to do what we can from home, instead of (just for example) taking the bus in every day. *sings hallelujah to the tune of the Loan Ranger theme, which comes out sounding quite suitably unhinged*
So, yeah, that was my week. How was yours?
Ugh. I mean ugh.
So, yes, hi. This week, Umich finally decided to move classes online. This happened in the form of a message on WEDNESDAY saying that classes were cancelled for the last two days of the week to give faculty time to shift to online. It didn't have a smiley emoji on the end, but you could tell it would have if the uni president knew how to add one.
Umich, and ESPECIALLY the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, which employs me, is a wholly residential school. It prides itself on being a residential school, with the residential experience, and only a smattering of online programs at the graduate level in the professional Colleges. When I say that the university is utterly, abysmally, unspeakably unprepared to do any online teaching whatsoever, I am understating the case by about a thousand percent.
Nevertheless! Four whole days, to prepare to go wholly online!
I should, perhaps, mention that my unit, all seven of us, are the ones who would be responsible for online education at LSA (all 20,000 students and 4,000 instructors worth of LSA), supposing there was any online education, which there isn't. If you think this means there are exactly two of us (one of them me) who are in any way prepared to support the (4,000) faculty in this, you would be correct.
Now, I saw this coming last week, and have been writing webpages of recommendations and resources like a madwoman to get them up in time, and I made it by the skin of my teeth, but of course then the entire goddamn College ignored that advice to attempt to almost ALL hold class by videoconference. Never having done so before. In the middle of the whole rest of the country trying to do the same thing. I'm sure you can imagine how well this is going so far, and we haven't even had actual classes that way yet.
So, my boss is losing her mind, my team is losing their minds, my faculty are losing their minds, and it wasn't until Friday that the uni president finally, finally caved in and said non-essential staff should go remote too.
Non-essential staff only, mind you. The University isn't closing. Oh no. My parent unit is still responsible for assisting all those instructors who want to come in and use their classrooms as usual to lecture to empty seats and be recorded with Lecture Capture, and call it teaching. So, the rest of Technology Services is losing their minds also.
But I and my team, at least, will now be able to do what we can from home, instead of (just for example) taking the bus in every day. *sings hallelujah to the tune of the Loan Ranger theme, which comes out sounding quite suitably unhinged*
So, yeah, that was my week. How was yours?
There are really times I wonder...
Nov. 18th, 2012 07:59 pm...what a sane person like me is doing here. I honest to fuck just encountered a three page article all about how the title of Melville's epic poem Clarel is pronounced. Is the emphasis on the first or second syllable? It isn't clear which, because the (relentless) iambic tetrameter of the poem presents both possibilities! Isn't that fascinating?!
Three whole pages just to say this. And then it was published. *headdesk* Oh my god, you guys, why am I working with these people, again?
See, when I say that literary scholarship is just another fandom (or huge slew of different fandoms) I'm totally not kidding. The flame wars over utterly inconsequential things just involve more syllables.
On which note: Rolfe + Vine = OTP. Some day I really will print a bumpersticker of that, and about five other people in the whole world will know what it means. Academia: redefining "small fandom".
Three whole pages just to say this. And then it was published. *headdesk* Oh my god, you guys, why am I working with these people, again?
See, when I say that literary scholarship is just another fandom (or huge slew of different fandoms) I'm totally not kidding. The flame wars over utterly inconsequential things just involve more syllables.
On which note: Rolfe + Vine = OTP. Some day I really will print a bumpersticker of that, and about five other people in the whole world will know what it means. Academia: redefining "small fandom".
