Branch: [spends over a month speed-running new edtech adoption, vetting three tools, organizing demos, being stalked by vendors, wringing votes out of the stakeholder faculty] Contestant B, you are the winner! Gimme a pilot contract and we'll negotiate.

Vendor B: [nearly salivating into their email] Possibly 10K users, you say? Possibly 20K? Why yes, we can do you an unlimited pilot for dirt cheap, and would you like to see our price teiring with massive discounts for volume? Would it help if you just gave us a Purchase Order and we'll get your faculty access before the contract actually goes through? Whatever you need! XD XD XD

Branch: [down to about one millimeter of cope, finally relaxes] It's good to be king, over half of a large and prestigious university, king.

So, we have network back at work! Yay! Also, the process of at risk accounts all re-setting their passwords has begun. The email thread for that looks kind of like this:

1) Here's the list of people who need to re-set their passwords please; it needs to be done in person at the moment, thank you!

2) Everyone on the list, please report to campus to re-set your passwords in person; we know this is a pain, but we need to get this done.

3) DO NOT REUSE AN OLD PASSWORD, RESET IT TO SOMETHING NEW FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

You can almost hear the twang as that director's temper hit the end of its rope. I'm just sitting over here with my popcorn, since none of my people are on the list.

So, I haven’t posted in a while, what with work insanity and depression, and the general AAAAAAAAAAAAAA of life.

(I really feel that possum meme, these days. Reeeeeally feel it.)

But this deserves documentation. So, let’s hear about Branch’s Adventures in Reaching Champaign Mutherfucking Illinois.

I thought this would go smoothly, is the thing. I reserved a seat on a plane big enough not to be going jugga-jugga-jugga the whole damn way, and (since this is the last “leadership” workshop I have to attend) used my travel points from the past year to bump up to first class. I also reserved (well in advance) cabs from actual, bonded and insured, professional cab services, at least one of which I’ve had excellent experiences with in the past.

Well, first off, that was exactly the service whose driver had sudden car trouble. But it’s fine, it’s fine, they’ll have another car to me only 15 minutes late. So I am picked up and dropped off in good order, and am hustling a little, because pre-boarding started about as my feet hit the pavement at the terminal. But it’s fine! First class, thankfully, lets you use the priority lane, and I get my bag checked and hustle for TSA Pre-check, and get through that fairly promptly.

Aaaaand I get hit with the random check. And then the whirly-invade-your-bodily-privacy machine gets snippy over the bra hardware in my racerback. Both the attendant and I paused to give the machine nearly identical looks of “fucking really?”, and then I was allowed to run for my gate. Made it with fifteen minutes until undocking! And I was immediately supplied with the water I hadn’t had the time to buy. Yay first class.

And then we launch. In heavy clouds. Moving from one sea-side city across to another sea-side city. If you fly much, you know that every single one of those is another strike against a smooth flight, so it was jugga-jugga-jugga the whole way after all.

At least I had a comfortable seat to be increasingly nauseated in.

So we get on the ground! I get my bag fairly promptly (and take a second to buy water and a Sprite, this time), and after only a very minimal comedy of errors, my driver and I connect and he loads me into quite a nice car.

And then, Chicago traffic. This element speaks for itself, I feel.

So by the time we were out of the city, my anti-nausea meds were still doing their job, but also hitting me with drowsiness, which is never fun in a moving vehicle. Eventually, I did give in and close my eyes, but the thing is, proprioception data that I do not initiate does really, really bad things to my inner ear these days. Which is to say, about halfway there, I started up and urgently informed the driver that he needed to stop, as I was about to hurl.

We almost made it. Fortunately, this hotel has laundry service.

Also fortunately, the car had that wonderful thing: heated passenger seats. So I used my handiwipes to wipe off as best as possible and loaded up again, and I turned on the seat warmer to stave off the core-temperature crash that always seems to follow tossing my cookies. Or my sun-chips, as the case may be.

(Sometimes it really helps to pay for the best, or at least to let the University pay for it on your behalf.)

And finally, we arrive at the hotel! It’s quite a nice hotel, something I can appreciate now I’m not violently ill. Best of all, they did, in fact, provide the ‘add on’ items I pre-ordered in a bit of a splurge to celebrate the end of this fucking set of workshops: a bottle of red and a plate of chocolate dipped strawberries.

So I have cranked up the heat and unpacked my things, and dinner tonight is going to be really quite good chocolate strawberries, to console me for such an absolute shit travel day.

Perhaps tomorrow, when I feel up to a cabernet, I shall call room service and request a bottle opener, since I was packing light and neglected to bring mine.

So, the term is rolling, and no one is dead yet, including the instructor who took up eight hours of three different consultants' time tutoring her in making recordings only to decide that she would use one of the Lecture Capture enabled conference room 'studios' instead, "thanks anyway". And that was a very close one.

But today, today I may have slain someone, and I'm not sorry at /all/.

Someone from Perusall (collaborative annotation tool) popped up in Boss's inbox saying that we have so many instructors using Perusall now, isn't that great, and this is usually when they start negotiations for a site license; is she the person to talk to?

Background: Perusall is installed at root, in our Canvas instance, and any instructor in the Uni can activate it in their course with no restrictions. This is specifically because Perusall, three years back, suggested doing so and promised they were and would remain a free tool, subsidized by their sweetheart deals with textbook publishers.

So I saw red, told Boss I'd deal with it, and promptly forwarded the email to central IT's software licensing group, with a note that they were the unit who could talk about whole-university site licensing, and also, just incidentally, that if they were exploring licensing they might want to compare features and price points on Hypothes.is, the other annotation tool I know some instructors use; that either tool would work just as well for all the use-cases I know of, if we have to pick one. And then I dropped a note to the Harmonize rep that if they can push up text-annotation in their development queue, I could write a /very/ convincing sole-source argument for adopting them instead of Perusall.

*smiles sweetly and coldly*

NO ONE tries to shake MY College down for license money, buddy, not and walks away after.

*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.

So, I feel a bit like things have evened out for my job. I mean, we're still doing mad feats of instructional design and support, giving spring/summer instructors a handle on how to teach a fully online course, but we've got a system in place, at least. It isn't the deluge of "fix this immediate crisis". We even have some decent contingency brainstorming going on about Fall.

You may have noticed that every uni president out there is declaring "hope" that fall will be in-person or some kind of hybrid. If you think about class-change, when (in our case) 40K students hit the pavement in the same ten minutes, you will see the issues with hybrid. So, honestly? I'm going on the assumption that only hands-on courses (lab, studio, experiential course) will be on-campus, while the rest... well, the rest do /something/, which may involve reduced in-person meetings or weirdly extended hours to allow staggered passing time, or who the fuck knows.

(For my money, everyone who isn't hands-on will need to stay online. But I'll let the administrators brick-wall themselves to that conclusion in their own time.)

So work is going reasonably! I even made re-contact with the next vendor I was planning a pilot for!

The weather continues springlike, which means lovely, sunny days when it's way chillier than it looks, but all the trees and flowering trees are bursting into bud and bloom nevertheless. They're old hands at this. Half of my new plants have arrived, and are re-hydrating indoors.

And personal life is quite tolerable! Admittedly, I have reached the stage where my SCMs are so tight I get vertigo just lying flat on my back, but a memory from physical therapy solved that. With a towel rolled up under my neck, to support the arch, it's... not the most fun I've ever had, but I can do my 20 sit ups and 70 crunches and not fall over when I try to stand up again. I declare it a win.

(Which means my demi-pointe balance is back! Eee! My extension is still for shit, but I can damn well releve again!)

And then, of course, there's The Bunny. The Bunny that this video bunnied me with. The one about how Meng Yao showed just enough desire to stay that Lan Xichen actually offered to arrange it, which kicks the whole plot down the path shaped like "Meng Yao's entire moral compass is in reference to Lan Xichen" rather than "in reference to himself". The story has reached the point where the Wen sect is about to regret this fact very, very hard. Because adorable Mr "Senpai noticed me!" is about to become utterly feral Mr "You hurt my boyfriend, prepare to die", perfectly prepared to tear through the whole cultivation world like buzzsaw if that's what it takes, and without any restraint except, well, Lan Xichen.

Nie Mingjue thinks this is fucking hilarious, deep down. Both the Nie brothers totally ship it.

We're at about 20K words and still going.

So, just when I was thinking it might be safe to, like, breathe, one of my team announces that she will be retiring, not at the end of August, but at the BEGINNING OF JUNE.

Have I mentioned that Umich decided to hold all spring and summer courses online? Because they did. And who is the only online teaching support unit in all of LSA? That would be mine, yes.

And now I have exactly two months to force a new position posting through the current hiring freeze (because vital) at senior rank (because independent responsibility a must) do interviews (wholly online) and onboard the new sucker team member, possibly also online depending on when the lockdown lifts.

Two months.

While also running full speed with all the spring/summer faculty on our shoulders.

*bright, crazed smile*

I'm fine. This is fine. We're all fine, here.

Though the next person to ask me whether there's a timed option in Canvas Quizzes, when it says so right there in the settings, may not be.

You know, I can kind of understand the sudden flood of invitations to virtual events from retail outlets. It's a little slimy, because impulse buying is probably at an all-time and alarming high right now, but it's also true that retail is losing /normal/ sales and traffic right now. And they don't know that I'm hella busy. I mean, a lot of people aren't! So I don't mind them as much.

But the ed-tech companies who are circling in like vultures who see a tasty corpse, filling my inbox with breathless "opportunities"... them I'm keeping a shit list of. Those are the companies that I will cold-shoulder so very hard, when we're done with this, because I DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW, FUCK OFF, I'M TRYING TO EXPLAIN TO 4000 INSTRUCTORS THAT CANVAS WILL GRADE QUIZ QUESTIONS AUTOMATICALLY, DIE IN A FIRE MEDIASITE. They know exactly how busy instructional design and ed-tech support is right now. They are on the Fiber 500 Platinum shit list.

So, 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*

I 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!