All over this planet, teachers have sudden been whisked from their classrooms and thrust into the digital realm, asked to teach online with little or no training and very little preparation time. As you scramble to #quaranteach, I’d like to offer my experience to help you get through and even thrive in this strange time. I’m hosting a weekly (?) fellowship-and-support group for English Professors to gather together via WebEx to talk about challenges, successes, and strategies for #OnlineTeaching. This will not be an official training program or anything like that (but if you want such a thing, may I recommend Signum University’s Mentorship program?); instead, it will be a friendly peer discussion that I’ll guide, and I’m sure I’ll add some tips and tricks and suggestions as appropriate.
The first meeting will be:
Friday, April 17th
200pm CST (that’s U.S. Central Time)
A quick bit about me. I’ve been teaching online with Signum University since 2014, and I served as the Chair of the Language & Literature Department there from 2015 to 2019. In that role, I sometimes got to talk to faculty about best practices in online pedagogy, and I learned a lot about the differences between online and on-campus classes. This summer, I’d like to share that knowledge with you!
Right now, I’m teaching British Lit and freshman writing at Baylor University (where I’m a PhD Candidate), and the nearly universal shift to online course delivery has revealed areas of weakness in my own skills. In the first week after spring break, I found that I assigned too much additional work, I didn’t know how to balance required and optional assignments, and I didn’t adapt to all the WebEx features quickly enough. Therefore I, too, will benefit from our conversations, and I’m sure I’ll learn from you.
So if you’re an English professor who has recently moved to online teaching and you would like to join this discussion group, please email me:
sorina [dot] higgins [at] signumu [dot] org. If we don’t know one another personally, send me a little bio and a link to your institutional webpage. (I’m trying to avoid anything like zoombombers). I’ll reply with the WebEx login information. I’m going to limit this group to English Profs. to begin with; we shall see how it evolves.
Please help spread the word! And “holy luck” on your teaching endeavors. You’re doing really good work in these strange times; keep it up.
Sørina Higgins 