Teaching Online During the Covid-19 Outbreak, a Pop-the-Trunk Emergency Episode — Jordan Moog and Michele Curley

In late January, I happened to be in Shanghai at a Model UN Conference when the Corona Outbreak began in Wuhan Province. Since then I have been watching events unfold in China and elsewhere. Throughout the last two months, I’ve been struck by two things:

The comprehensive nature of the response in China: tens of millions of people were literally cut off from the world — imposed social distancing, mass in home quarantine, large scale deployment of chemical disinfectants, etc.
The immediate closure of schools in China and how teachers were continuing to meet the needs of their students.

I’ve tweeted a bit about the former and I took careful notes on the latter, knowing that sooner or later our time would (likely) come. On Thursday, March 4, while we were out of the country on spring break, we were notified that school would not reopen and would remain closed — for at least four weeks. Moreover, we were told that we’d commence teaching online the following Monday… WOOF. That was a three day turnaround and I was ten hours away over in Indonesia… WOOF x2.

In a matter of days, our school leadership spun up a schedule based on learnings from elsewhere and we dug into the work of teaching online. We are now in week two and I decided to sit down with a couple of colleagues and share our thoughts and learnings so far. This episode is about the whats and hows of our online teaching experiences. The IWL Podcast will have an episode about equity issues related to online teaching this Thursday.

Cast of Characters

Jordan Moog, US History and Global Studies, Lute

Michele Curley, French, tri-lingual Canadian: English, French, and Swahili (yeah, she’s that dude)

Going Further

I’ve been cataloguing my experience teaching online thus far in this thread

Socials

Jordan Moog – Twitter

Michele Curley – Twitter