"You teach Digital Construction, you can do that online easy"!

I wish I could post a photo of a modern, contemporary styled, ergonomically designed desk and chair with a pair of 21” monitors as Instagram would have you believe everyone has in their home.

But the harsh reality of my working from home is very evident in this photo, and I guess it may be the same for thousands of us this week. I have tried sitting at the family dining table and thought as I set up, this will be perfect.

However it sits in a thoroughfare and making screencasts, hosting Zoom meetings or virtual lessons is certainly not helped when people want their lunch (it’s amazing how noisy people are just making toast when you are recording a voiceover to a screencast). Has anyone else noticed how loud a cat’s meow is? Or does my microphone simply amplify a cat’s cry for attention?

So after a week of being very unproductive even though I worked longer hours than expected to (anyone else find it difficult to switch off because you have the office at home?), I was feeling incredibly guilty at the lack of quality support I was providing for my students. I have since moved the table that usually sits in my back garden into my eldest child’s bedroom. This will be perfect.

The dining chair is mildly comfortable for all of 30 minutes, and then I need to get up and go a wander through to the kitchen to loosen up. Which means I’m drinking lots, and eating lots and lots more. The table is old, and has rusting metal legs and feet. And so, to protect the room carpet, I have sat it on top of foam tiles from the Vex robotics cupboard, which when placed on the top of the table also lessen the discomfort from the cold glass surface. This will be perfect.

The first time I try to straighten out my legs, I hit my shin on a  metal cross member! Although I admit, I did hit my shin another couple of times before I finally gave up and decided I had to do something to fix it. Which resulted in a hunt in my garage for some pipe insulation I knew I had somewhere under 20 years of stuff. 20 minutes of my day lost searching for that, and a promise to myself to tidy out the garage in the next two weeks during my Easter holidays. This will be perfect.

So I’m now set up and ready to go and have bump protection on the steelwork, however after creating and editing my first recorded lessons, I realised how uncomfortable and bad for my neck my setup was. So out came the books. A bit of trial end error, and I found 4 books to hold the laptop at the perfect height. No aesthetic steam bent plywood laptop stand for me. This will be perfect.

I have my ‘to do’ list, so I’m not stuck for things to do. It already existed, just in a different format. It is my timetable and teaching plans. It consists of HNC and HND subjects, which I am attempting to record as I would deliver in the classroom, but it just isn’t happening. It isn’t as smooth. If any of my students are on here and reading this, you will understand. There are no laughs. No CAD Dad bad jokes. No friendly exchange of good humour. No pausing for questions.  I am really not enjoying doing this in such a sterile way. It feels so detached from the buzz of the classroom.

All that aside, I really feel like educators have an ethical duty to give students every opportunity to continue their learning, when they can, if they can and how they can.  I really do love my ‘job’ and hate to see students who through no fault of their own are being robbed of the chance to learn real vocational and very useful knowledge and skills.

So the video lessons will suffice, however I am a string believer that learning in any format needs to be backed up by assessment in some form too. In the ‘normal’ world, this happens both formally and informally, and it is extremely important to gauge where students are in their learning and makes identifying where students can strengthen their areas of knowledge and skills easy.  So that will be the next task. Creating useful feedback.

So, has anything worked well? 

Our ICT faculty have been awesome. Really pulling out all the stops at such short notice.  Allowing me to borrow high end computers and monitors etc, even installing a VPN so that I can access my files remotely.  Lecturers in the computing faculty rallied around and helped make Cat6 cables for anyone needing them. Autodesk provided the software licenses my students and I needed as well as additional BIM360 licenses so that we can collaborate from home in lessons.  I had joked often enough that the students all sit too close in the classroom to collaborate properly and I was about to move them around, maybe even use different classrooms, however this is really giving them the opportunity to collaborate over distance. 

We still communicate but it happens via our Facebook groups, and this time we chat more about the new video lessons that are being put online using our Virtual Learning Environment: Moodle. As I am usually found in a classroom stood in front of the students, I will be the first to admit that although I know how to use the VLE, I’m not the most organised person, and often it starts Week1, Week 2 etc but by Week 7 I have not populated anything and it fizzles out.  Partly that is because I am super busy, but I know I’m always in class and cover everything the students need to know (and then more). However working from home, I have really started using the VLE as it should be used. Each week has bullet points of the learned topics, they are dated, and discussion points within, but also now they are backed up by a recording of my screen as I worked my way through each task with full audio narration. 

Further Education is not noted for the preparation time lecturers receive. I simply haven’t had the time to create any in depth supplementary teaching resources that I can easily switch over to distance learning. Please don’t think these videos should replace lessons. They won’t. But they are the best resource available that I can produce right now. We definitely underestimate enthusiasm and how it passes from the lecturer to student. Personally, I could give many examples where across my teaching career I have seen students excel as a direct result of the enthusiasm given off by their lecturers.

So what’s next?

As I said, I’m already revisiting lessons that I thought worked very well. However this gives me the chance to rethink my lessons and ask: are they as effective as they can be? Once something works – we tend to rest on laurels, so maybe they can be better. I can certainly be doing with the time to actually progress my own learning. I have been saying for years I want to learn Dynamo, Model Checker and other tools.

Why have I written this? 

Because what I’m also missing is my workplace rant!  Those that know me will know I like a good rant occasionally.  I love a good rant about how things could be better ??