In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, teachers around the world have diligently continued teaching, wondering, "How safe are we?" Finally, our school administrators started answering that question by closing our classrooms' physical doors while simultaneously opening the gates for national and international online teaching. Overnight, educators have been tasked with transforming our face-to-face classes into online (or remote) classes. At the outset, most schools had no "conversion plans."
Initially, teachers jumped to email lists, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media venues, sharing their online pedagogies and conversion strategies. After a few days, some schools with technology support started sending information they designed for developing online classes before the school years starts, not in the middle. At first, from all the help, teachers let out collective sighs of thankful relief. However, it quickly became apparent that the enormity of applying the philosophies and pedagogies of face-to-face teaching to online instruction is an immense challenge--even raising, in some cases, questions about whether our approaches to face-to-face instruction will work well in online instructional contexts. In addition, teachers who might still be struggling to keep up with grading from their face-to-face classes now find themselves facing an influx of student email messages.
We value all experiences, whether you teach in a K-12, technical school, community college, or university setting. This archive is our attempt to document as many teachers' experiences of how the overnight cancellation of face-to-face meetings and conversion to fully online courses impacted them.
We believe that unless we capture our stories in our own words, they will be lost or, perhaps worse, told by others who haven't lived through teaching and learning in the time of coronavirus. Our collective experiences will be open and available for present and future teachers, administrators, and researchers.
John Scenters-Zapico, Lindsey Marie Harding, and Mike Palmquist have been involved in developing this archive. It has been made available on the WAC Clearinghouse resources page for anyone who wishes to understand this important moment in history. If you have questions, please direct them to John at John.Scenters-Zapico@csulb.edu. We'll be happy to respond to questions or other inquiries.