I am incredibly direct. Most of the time, I don't think I'm rude (anymore - I admit I've had to work hard to learn how to be more diplomatic); I simply have a hard time not saying what I'm thinking. And there are times when I forget that, as a teacher, this is not a good thing. I'm pretty sure I've never been publicly rude to a student but in class last night, I reacted without thinking to something a student said and the more I've thought about it, the more I feel stupid about it. I wasn't actually reacting to the student himself; he used a term that I haven't heard in a while, that he had obviously learned in another economics class, and I was thrown off because a) it took me a second to figure out what he was talking about and b) when I realized what he meant, it told me something about the way one of my colleagues must teach a particular course. I laughed, then realized that the student might think I was laughing at him, so I felt like I needed to explain why I was laughing, but I think that only made it worse. It was an awkward moment at the time, and I feel even more awkward about it now, but there's not much I can do about it about at this point except try to remember to think a little longer before I open my mouth...
As someone who has worked hard to build a lot of interactivity into my courses, I have never been interested in teaching fully online courses, in part because I have felt that the level of engaged interaction could never match that of a face-to-face class (not that there aren't some exceptional online courses out there; I just have a strong preference for the in-person connection). But the current situation is not really about building online courses that are 'just as good' as our face-to-face courses; it is about getting through this particular moment without compromising our students' learning too much. So if you are used to a lot of interaction in your F2F class, here are some options for adapting that interaction for a virtual environment: [NOTE: SDSU is a Zoom/mostly Blackboard campus so that's how I've written this but I am pretty sure that other systems have similar functionality] If you use clickers in class to break up what is otherwise mostly lect...
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