What if our university closes? What if our international students are stranded? He had just extended spring break to April 3, giving faculty three weeks to design and place courses online. I am far from a newcomer to higher education. As professor emeritus of communication arts, I have been at this gig for 49 years and have never shied away from a challenge.
I have designed and taught multiple distance education courses but only one online courseβan interdisciplinary mix of Irish literature and small group discussion. With the clock ticking, I was faced with the challenge of creating two online public speaking courses that met, and hopefully surpassed, the expectations of students I had come to know well.
Several of my students worked full-time jobs. Others were high school seniors enrolled in their first-ever university course. Many lived in small towns with limited access to high speed internet. As I planned lectures, I tried to break my course down to the bare essentials. Did I even have to include mythos? Of course I did. What about concession statements?
Could I forgo that lecture? Absolutely not. When it came to a final count, I was up to 26 lectures. Too many? Not if I made those lectures stimulating. That video must have captured the attention of students because several chose to speak about whether or not parents who spank their children scar them emotionally My grandson, Rockton, is eight now and, as far as I can tell, emotionally unscarred. Before recording lectures, I scouted out filming locations in my home.
I recorded several videos in front of an Impressionist painting of cellists that I had purchased from one of my students. I recorded the remaining videos in front of a painting my grandmother had passed down to my mother and my mother to me.
