What can I say about the pandemic’s effect on education that hasn’t already been said?
When it became apparent that we were going to shut-down (early March, 2020), everybody was thrown into a mad scramble to figure out what they would do. Some stuck with the the synchronous-via-Zoom model, but with all the uncertainty, I decided to go for the asynchronous approach. While that is somewhat workable in upper-division courses where we could shift to discussion forums and use the full capabilities of learning management systems, it would be a disaster for the lower-level courses that are so critical to language departments. Few students come to college thinking “I want to major in Spanish!” Normally, they take the GEP course and have so much fun that they decide to carry on. Those classes both make and break our departments.
I decided to make the best of a bad situation. Using screen-recording software and my Surface Tablet as a whiteboard, I recorded my classes and posted them to YouTube, working through material as I would in the physical classroom. I introduced topics, gave students time to pause the video and complete activities, and then worked through answers as if we were in class.
Could this approach replace the classroom experience? Absolutely not. One of the (only) nice things about the pandemic is how it showed us that online education sucks and cannot replace the classroom. Nevertheless, as a stop-gap measure, my videos did work. While I returned to the classroom in fall 2020, I went back and recorded all of my intro classes as videos (in both Spanish and French). Students who miss class put them to good use, and some diligent students will watch them before/after class to reinforce materials.
I also record a short video before the semester starts to introduce students to the class, and walk them through the textbook and Canvas.
