Author: Matthew

An apology, with context

Trigger warning: If my recent comment in an email to department chairs about ideologues offended you, then you may want to rethink reading this post.

I’ll start with an apology for letting my sarcasm off the customary tight leash in my comment about ideologues and normal people. I was (sincerely) trying to make a serious point with a little humor, and if that offended you or raised eyebrows, I am sorry.

As is often the case with me, I see an opportunity in this situation for reflection, so, in that spirit, let’s talk about context.

The Strait of Messina, that is. As in, right between Scylla and Charybdis.

Charybdis: Try to do everything and fail at most of it. 

Scylla: Compromise. Give up some things, and hang onto what's essential.

Odysseus had to sacrifice some of his crew to Scylla to avoid losing the entire ship to Charybdis. (Yes, I know that people use this image to mean two equally bad alternatives. I can’t help it; I like Homer.)

In the wake of ACC’s COVID-19 response, an LA prof asked me for advice about going online, and here’s what I said:

Set low expectations and prioritize mercilessly. This is triage, not reconstructive surgery. The outcome has to work, but it doesn’t have to be pretty. Our goal is to survive, with as much integrity as possible, until the end of the spring semester. The only way to do that is to hang onto what is foundational.

Let’s say you decided to overhaul your course and transform it into a lighthouse beacon of online teaching. You look, for instance, at TLED’s excellent collection of resources, and you think: Whoa — I could do anything with all this stuff!

Wake up. That’s not where we are this week. What if you have little or no experience with online teaching, and you have to be ready in, like, two weeks? Now that magnificent collection of resources looks a lot like you’ve been asked to count grains of sand on a very long Sicilian beach, by next Monday.

So, look away for a moment. Take stock: What is actually necessary for you to do to make your course work? Start with the foundational and genuinely necessary, and build up from there — if you have time. This is triage.

If you’re a professor in that situation, you’re likely to translate your tried-and-true teaching strategies strait from f2f into online. Under normal circumstances, you’d have all sorts of people telling you that you’ve got the wrong approach because online teaching isn’t analogous to f2f teaching, etc. They’re right, but ignore those voices, especially if they’re inside your head. This is triage.

ACC is going to give you access to a mentor (who should be an experienced online prof) and to instructional designers. Use these resources to find ways to leverage what you do best as a teacher and turn it to your advantage online. Avoid Charybdis, and pass by Scylla.

If your class is heavily text-based, my staff are available to scan and deliver pdfs right to a google drive with your name on it, ready to be dropped into your Blackboard course or shared with students.

If you typically lecture, look at Collaborate or try a lower-bar videoconferencing tool like Google Meet — and again, we’re here to help you hook it up with the training you need.

Let’s say you’re into student discussion groups: Recast them into discussion boards. Post a video of yourself setting up the discussion and then turn them loose. Use Google Meet’s chat function to get your students engaged in what you’re saying by posing questions. Get students to collaborate digitally and make a YouTube video explaining something. (Your students are probably ready to do that on their own, so leverage their skills as well!)

I’m asking department chairs to set up Blackboard shells for courses or clusters of courses and invite generous experienced online profs to drop their assignments and other useful artifacts into that shell. Steal from them — if their assignments help you achieve your goal, copy them into your shell and sail on.

We need to make it through the strait, one way or another. Embrace the fact that it’s not going to be a luxury cruise. This is not the time to judge yourself by an inappropriate standard, like the work you would do if you had the inclination and all the time in the world.

This is triage. We can do triage.

The week of 03.23 – 29, all f2f and hybrid sections in LA will transition to online instruction. Here is the AoS plan to support professors with this transition.

[dwqa-list-questions category=”covid19″]

Many of you have heard me argue against the term guided pathways in favor of a participle with connotations that I find more compelling: guiding pathways. The present participle suggests to me a more open, engaged, mentoring approach to pathways, which fits better with the liberal arts. As I have often quipped, the Yellow Brick Road was a guided pathway, and look what happened: Witches, Forks, and Flying Monkeys.

In the spirit of guiding pathways, I’d like to start a conversation about serving CoReq students in a more effective, focused way, a way that leverages faculty expertise along three different axes: the developmental ed experts, HUMA1301 Great Questions, and the LA Gateway. CoReq is moving in the direction of an INRW/ENGL1301 pathway, so let’s envision a thoroughly integrated curriculum, to maximize the clarity of the student’s trajectory and simultaneously the effectiveness of support services along the way.

Words have consequences. When we talk about the skills students learn in the liberal arts, what are we saying when we call them “soft”?

First, as I have frequently said, if “soft skills” were all that soft, employers and CEOs wouldn’t be clamoring for them and they wouldn’t be so hard to find. More importantly, “soft” implies that these skills are somehow squishy, touchy-feely things that you just “pick up” by osmosis rather than acquire through application and dedication. You know, like the “hard sciences.”

When you call LA skills “soft,” you’re complicit in a value scheme that has placed these skills lower — but “the market” is telling you otherwise. So obviously, we need a better term.