by John Tiedemann, Teaching Associate Professor, Writing Program
It’s tempting, given the complex and dauntingly immediate technological and logistical challenges involved in getting all our classes online all at once and immediately, to think of the transition to the spring quarter this year as a largely technical matter. However, I think it’s important, for our students’ sake, not to treat the challenges as only or even primarily technical, nor even pedagogical — at least not insofar as we think of pedagogy as the delivery of “content.” If the first week of spring is to be a “reorientation week,” then we need to think of that week as reorienting the whole student. As Jeremy recently reminded us in his talk on the “4D student,” our students are not only fledgling scholars: they’re also citizens; they’re also individuals with career paths and social lives; they’re also persons with bodies and psyches that need to be healthy and well. To put our best forward during that first week (and the weeks to come), we’ll need to think creatively about how to adapt not only the scholarly dimension of the learning experience to an online environment, but how to adapt these other social, inter- and intra-personal dimensions, too.
Read full post at otl.du.edu.