Hello, hello! Long time no see. When I started this blog in March 2020, I intended it to chronicle my experience of moving my Calculus 2 class online in light of Covid-19. Having said that, I did have plans for what this blog would become after my class ended: I wanted to continue writing about techniques that have helped me improve my teaching, as well as pedagogical tools that I have considered implementing but haven’t yet (and why).
Once Spring 2020 actually ended, though, I hit a metaphorical wall: the structure that having a class to teach was giving me suddenly disappeared, and I had a hard time reinventing my schedule from scratch. So I took an unintentional 5-week hiatus from this blog and spent some time (finalizing grades and) tending to other aspects of my personal and professional life. I spent more time doing research and writing, learned to cook more delicious food, started learning how to draw and illustrate on my iPad (using Procreate).
I also started coding a board game in Python, which is a side-project I’ve wanted to work on since freshman year of college and have just not gotten around to it. (If any of this interests you, tell me in the comments: I’d love to chat more about my quarantine hobbies!)
Alongside these personal projects, I got nominated for and accepted a fellowship that will allow me to work closely with math faculty specifically on ways to engage students in an online platform. As part of this fellowship, I participated in a 3-week training that was meant to “help faculty reconceptualize their course materials in order to deliver it an online course or be prepared to move flexibly between different modalities of delivery.”
The cohort of trainees in this 3-week program included faculty and graduate students from all departments of Emory. The graduate students were mostly those who were nominated by their respective departments for this fellowship. In contrast, the faculty included everyone teaching in the Summer semester at Emory. This allowed me to have conversations with people in all sorts of subjects about effective teaching.
Starting next week, I will help facilitate a similar training, specifically aimed at the math faculty who are signed up to teach in the Fall. I’m excited to get to talk to people who have taught math for years and years, about the challenges and opportunities of teaching an intentional, engaging, and rigorous online course.
What this means for this blog for the next few weeks, is that instead of posting about things I’ve done and whether they helped, I might post about challenges I foresee in remote learning and possibly ideas about how to overcome them. Since I’ve never taught a real online class before, most of these blog-posts might feel unresolved and might end with more questions than answers. I hope that writing these questions down will help me clarify ideas in my head and help me gather ideas from the internet hive-mind.
So I hope you will engage, and if you have ideas and solutions, you will share. One of my favorite mentors recently told me that she believes teaching should be a community exercise, and that she wants to foster an environment (within our department) where anyone can go up to anyone else and ask “Hey, I’m teaching XYZ and I’ve run into this problem. How did you handle it when you taught something similar?” I hope that I can practice the same in this little corner of the academic internet.
See you guys next week, with the first installment in this series, a blogpost about synchronous vs. asynchronous delivery.
Maryam Khaqan 
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