Teaching online
May. 16th, 2020 10:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
graculusOkay, so I have the luxury of having an employer that is not caning me for hours and hours of online teaching (thank the gods) but that doesn't mean that what I'm doing isn't immensely frustrating. I can't imagine trying to do this from the start of a new class, with learners I don't know, and building relationships with them in any meaningful way.
In the same way as I'm pretty much left to my own devices with what to teach, as long as I can demonstrate progress and my learners pass their exams, I've been left to my own devices with the online stuff. The people I teach are adults, with their own responsibilities, and this current situation has messed with everyone - most of them have school-age children, for starters, others have either been furloughed or potentially lost their jobs. Many of them are in high-risk categories because of medical issues or their ethnic background (since we don't know yet if the virus disproportionately hits particular parts of the community or if those apparent differences are more economically or socially-driven) or multi-generation households.
This is a bad thing for online learning, even if people actually read their emails in a timely fashion.
I teach 3 classes of 15, so I've been offering online sessions via Zoom to all of them. One class, I don't have emails for some of them and have had literally zero interest in taking up these sessions. I get the occasional email back from them but that's it. The other classes, about 75% of each class expressed an interest in using Zoom but the most I've managed to get at any one time is 4. Not always the same 4, either.
The last 2 sessions I've done, I had one learner try and connect but fail to get his sound working and give up. That's it. I'm actually typing this as the minutes tick by into the cut-off zone for this session (15 minutes is reasonable) and I can call it a day.
We were literally a week away from exams for two of these classes and now we're stuck in this limbo. The government is pushing for some of the primary school and secondary school classes to go back but there's a lot of resistance from both teachers and parents. No idea when we might re-open, as we need those children to go back to school so their parents can return to do their exams (and hopefully a bit of preparation beforehand).
And that's it, time to hang up. *sigh*
In the same way as I'm pretty much left to my own devices with what to teach, as long as I can demonstrate progress and my learners pass their exams, I've been left to my own devices with the online stuff. The people I teach are adults, with their own responsibilities, and this current situation has messed with everyone - most of them have school-age children, for starters, others have either been furloughed or potentially lost their jobs. Many of them are in high-risk categories because of medical issues or their ethnic background (since we don't know yet if the virus disproportionately hits particular parts of the community or if those apparent differences are more economically or socially-driven) or multi-generation households.
This is a bad thing for online learning, even if people actually read their emails in a timely fashion.
I teach 3 classes of 15, so I've been offering online sessions via Zoom to all of them. One class, I don't have emails for some of them and have had literally zero interest in taking up these sessions. I get the occasional email back from them but that's it. The other classes, about 75% of each class expressed an interest in using Zoom but the most I've managed to get at any one time is 4. Not always the same 4, either.
The last 2 sessions I've done, I had one learner try and connect but fail to get his sound working and give up. That's it. I'm actually typing this as the minutes tick by into the cut-off zone for this session (15 minutes is reasonable) and I can call it a day.
We were literally a week away from exams for two of these classes and now we're stuck in this limbo. The government is pushing for some of the primary school and secondary school classes to go back but there's a lot of resistance from both teachers and parents. No idea when we might re-open, as we need those children to go back to school so their parents can return to do their exams (and hopefully a bit of preparation beforehand).
And that's it, time to hang up. *sigh*
