Looking back: One year ago, today, I was finishing seven hours of video production work, compiling several hours of Zoom training videos into one 30-minute Teaching with Zoom tutorial for our faculty members. I was not alone during this mid-week of March 2020; instructional designers like me from around the country had shifted into high gear to support instructors transitioning to fully-online teaching due to campus shutdowns under the Coronavirus pandemic. Even today, I join many across the globe who are reflecting back on the struggle of the past year’s COVID-19-induced educational crisis. But we can all acknowledge that e-learning has served us well….
It has often been suggested to me to keep a journal — because words written on paper somehow have special significance. They are more meaningful…more tangible. But I love the creativity of digital spaces. The stories I can tell here, through imagery and interconnections, are no less poignant or passionate. In this virtual world, my medium becomes multi-media. …
For those of us in online education, the necessary response to the COVID-19 pandemic was clear, but certainly not simple. Just as we had done for our global campus students, we needed to employ a video-conferencing technology for our on-campus courses as well. This would be a challenge for everyone: students, faculty, seminary staff, and particularly the educational technology team. And like many educational institutions around the world, this transition had to come rapidly in response to this Coronavirus-induced educational crisis. . .
As I am writing this post, I have a sense that every word I type is entering, not a black hole, but rather an internet galaxy of trillions of gigabytes (correction, zettabytes) of other words and images. And rather than entering what used to be deemed as a mysterious cyberspace, my words are now searchable, indexable, and can even be claimed and named by another person altogether. . .