Bloom's Sixth

The fog that settled on the Lawrence campus Monday morning seemed all too fitting. Classes officially resumed after an extended spring break, but Jayhawk Boulevard was mostly empty, as were the buses that passed by. Faculty and students alike ventured into a hazy online learning environment cobbled together with unseen computer chips and hidden strings of code. Even the most optimistic took slow, careful steps onto a path with an uncertain end point. A view east along Jayhawk Boulevard from near Marvin Hall. We’re all feeling disoriented in this virtual fog, and it’s especially important…

It’s the little things we miss when our routines change. This isn’t the working whistle. It’s the one on display in the Kansas Union. As classes move online, those little things will add up for faculty, staff and students. We won’t bump into colleagues along Jayhawk Boulevard. There will be no chalking on sidewalks on Wescoe Beach, no sound of the fountain on West Campus Drive, no view of the Campanile over Potter Lake, no smell of books in the stacks at Watson Library, no view of the flags atop Fraser Hall. We can …

One aspect of online teaching that I feared would make it less enjoyable for me as an instructor is that my students and I wouldn’t get to know one another as well as we do in our in-person courses. I thought that it would be difficult to replicate the interaction and dynamic atmosphere of a classroom where we all exchange ideas, participate in thoughtful discussions, challenge each other’s beliefs and positions, develop an understanding of and respect for one another, and come to care about each other as fellow humans. As I have developed new courses and adjusted and redesigned old…

This is what teaching online looks like. That’s not quite right. This is what planning for teaching online looks like after a week and a weekend of long days and an early meeting on Monday morning. About noon, I looked down and realized I was wearing mismatched boots. Some people wear mismatched socks. I wear mismatched boots. Rather than hide them, I showed them to everyone I met on what was probably the last day of in-person meetings for quite some time. I emailed the photo to colleagues and to my students. Everyone needed the laugh. “We’re not really laughing at you,” Diana Koslowsky…

Take a deep breath. You are about to launch into an online adventure. Yes, I know, you didn’t want to take this trip. The corona virus – and the university – made you do it. Like it or not, though, we are all on the same trip, one that will take us deep into the uncharted territory of a quickly deployed online teaching and learning matrix of enormous scale. This involves not just the University of Kansas, but hundreds of colleges and…

Among academics, online education inspires about as much enthusiasm as a raft sale on a cruise ship. That’s unfortunate, given that higher education’s cruise ship has a hull full of leaks and has been taking on water for years. The latest evidence of academic disdain for online education comes from the Online Report Card, which is sponsored by the Online Learning Consortium and other organizations (There was a link, but the page does not exist anymore), and has been published yearly since 2003. It is based on surveys conducted by Babson Survey Research Group in Fall 2015. In that…