Schools closing due to Covid-19?
My college has closed here in New York for the duration, so I have been busy transitioning my face-to-face classes over to the online Blackboard platform. We are to finish this semester online, and will reevaluate at the end. The governor of New York has to lift his closing order before we go back to campus.
Right now, after the shock wore off, I have been moving information, syllabi, and course calendars to the online courses, and reworking my tests and written assignment guidelines. The beauty of it is that, since I do not use video, I can happily stay home and "teach" in the nude! I can also get comfortable with the platform (which has some weird glitches) and perhaps be able to offer online sections of my courses going forward which will allow me to work naked from home. I have my fingers crossed!
I am holding my own at the moment. Each week, I am online for about 2 hours adding stuff to the course webpages and reading students' discussion posts. They are on Spring Break this week, so I am prepping the online test for when they get back, and the discussion board for the next chapter. The drawback is students who are registered for the course who have simply disappeared since school closed the campus, and unfortunately, with 6 weeks left to semester, unless they reappear soon, they will be flunking the course.
I've just finished up with online classes. My district decided to continue with e-learning. The problem I was faced with was having enough content for my 5 preps. I stayed very very busy the last 2 months and am glad it's over. I did however learn a great deal from this process and may have a workable process to semi-flip my classroom now.