We’ve Done This Before

As someone who has been teaching for almost 20 years, I periodically have the experience of stumbling on old course materials and thinking, “Dang, this was a ton of work. And not half bad. Why am I not still using it??”

I had that feeling again last week. With each new announcement of campus closure and a further day of remote learning, I began thinking back to 2020 and all the work we did to pivot online in the space of a week. It took a while to hunt some of that material down (we had placed much of it on a centralized website that wasn’t maintained by the CAT), but once we found it, I was surprised by how well it held up and how relevant it was to our current situation.

So even though we weren’t sure what was coming this weekend, we spent some time at the end of last week reconstituting our keepteaching.wfu.edu website, and it is now live, just in time for the announcement of yet another day of emergency remote learning tomorrow.

On this site you’ll find broad guidance for how to think about what it means to pivot your courses in an emergency, practical strategies for teaching remotely, links to campus resources, and—my favorite feature—a curated list of evergreen blog posts and advice columns from the spring of 2020.

Of course, artificial intelligence was not on our mind at the time much of this was written (one disruption at a time, thank you very much!), and it does make some of the advice more complicated. But for the most part, for only a week or two of remote learning, it still holds up relatively well.

I encourage you to take a look, even if you’re relatively confident about your plan for tomorrow. At the very least, it’s a good reminder of how much work we all did and how hard we all were thinking about our teaching back then. And we can take comfort knowing that, this time, there is less uncertainty about the future. We know the sun will eventually come out, the ice will melt, and we’ll all be together again.