The online classroom: it’s virtually necessary

By Robert Huish. I am supposed to be giving a lecture tonight to my class at Dalhousie. But it will not be in the usual 200-person auditorium at Dalhousie University. No, the Halifax airport is shut down today, and I have been stranded looking for a flight to get home.
This is not supposed to be a problem. The University provides faculty with software to do the lecture remotely. This program is supposed to broadcast your lecture slides, your voice, video, animations and other pedagogical modernities to the student’s laptops or iPhones. In the departures hall, I have been scrolling through the slides while speaking with my nose an inch or two away from my laptop’s screen in order to drown out the departure calls. I am now on my third attempt at uploading the lecture. During the two previous attempts a prompt came up, saying “server failure.” The program crashed and nothing was recorded or could be recovered. An hour lecture up in smoke – three times over. Read more...