The last two weeks of our lectures for the Winter term (last two weeks of March) were all done “online”, since the on-campus activities were shut down. This was an interesting experience, especially since we only had a week to prepare. It took quite a few hours of effort to figure out the online technology and work out different ideas and approaches before starting.

For my Air Pollution Control course, I used Webex to deliver the last two weeks of lectures live, sort of like some Webinars I’ve done in the past. These lectures were also recorded so that students who couldn’t attend “live” could look at them later. I liked the live aspect, so that students could submit questions via the chat function as we went along. I think that the ability to ask and answer questions is important, and you lose something when it can’t be spontaneous.

Luckily for me, the last two weeks of material in my course was relatively easy to adapt for online delivery. It was largely descriptive, not so much mathematical or technical. Some things that I would have normally done on the board in a classroom I had to adapt into a powerpoint deck, but it wasn’t too bad.

Delivering a whole course online is another matter, which my colleagues are scrambling to do for the term starting in May. Doing it really well takes substantial development work and a pedagogical re-think of virtually everything about the course. From what I’ve read, properly developing a truly excellent online course can take many months of preparation, audio/video recording, and editing.

Unfortunately we haven’t had a lot of time to do this, but our instructors seem to be seriously working on it as best as they can. I don’t have any courses to teach in the May-August term, but I’m keeping a close eye on how it’s done in case we are still teaching online in September when I teach another course. The university has developed a website where we can find some suggestions and other resources for online teaching. I hope we can have classroom teaching again in September, but there are some doubts and I guess we have to be prepared for anything at this stage.