The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear: we have to make some changes to the way we teach.

The stress is palpable at the beginning of the fall term. Summer has come too quickly to an end. The thought of pulling everything together for the courses you’re slated to teach seems unbearable. You might take comfort from the fact that even those instructors who are organized and on the ball still wonder if they have everything in place. But that comfort is fleeting.

And of course, this year it’s even worse. How can we possibly teach our courses online, let alone asynchronously? How will students handle taking all of their courses online? If I teach synchronously, will I develop Zoomface, that squinty-eyed, open-jaw look you have when trying to find the button to unmute your mic?

We have experienced a very unsettling summer. The pandemic has been unnerving, and the racial injustice maddening. We’re all upset and anxious and exhausted. And now we have to try to focus our attention on teaching in a way that requires us to replace the classroom with this app or that webcam. Many barely tolerated the learning management system in the first place, now we have to actually teach with it?

Something changed this summer, and like everyone else, university instructors must come to terms with it. We all need to adjust to new kinds of workplaces and interactions mediated by technology. The irony that the technology seems to lessen the human element of those interactions even while it maintains them is not lost on us. But still.

Some remain attached to the old way of doing things, and not without good reason. In-person instruction has been the rule for most of human existence, and it’s not easy to give it up. We have all derived real pleasure from those classroom experiences where a light bulb went off and an idea was grasped or conceived.

And classrooms will come back, of that I have no doubt. Not as soon as we would wish, and adorned with hand sanitizer stations, but they will return.

In the meantime, however, we must meet the new teaching and learning constellation with more than a hint of optimism. Crises challenge us, but they also force us to find new solutions. So it goes with teaching. We should consider ourselves fortunate that we live in an age when we can keep education afloat even if we’re all sheltering in place. Our students are facing a very uncertain future, yet we can still equip them with the skills and the ideas to meet that future. All we need to do is to change our teaching styles, incorporate new practices and tools, adjust to altered environments and spaces. It’s a tall order, but we can do it.

For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.

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