The Comments: Winter, 2022

Wow, it has been a long time since I last posted responses from teaching evaluations. Partly that's because the Department of Psychology paused the Teaching Honour Roll about 4 years ago and hasn't started them up again. (Why? The criteria for being put on the Honour Roll require that a certain percentage of the class must respond to the end-of-term evaluations. Since moving USRIs online in Fall, 2014, response rates have plummeted from 80% to just over 50%. And that's where everything has been stuck since 2018.)

During the first term interrupted by Covid, there were no formal USRIs. (I still sent out a Google Form to my class because that feedback is important to me--especially during the difficult shift to remote teaching.)

Anyway, here are written comments provided by students this past Winter term from my PSYCO 282 course. Enjoy--but remember that my responses (in parentheses and in bold) to these comments may have an extra dash or snark and a pinch of sarcasm!

- Probably best prof I've had so far

- It's clear that Dr. Loepelmann cares about teaching and his students. He makes every lecture enjoyable on top of being well organized, well spoken, and overall a great professor.

- Psyco 282 with Professor Loepelmann was one of the most enjoyable and well-organized courses I took this semester. Whether it was online classes at the beginning of the term, or in-person classes later on, Professor Loepelmann made the lectures clear, interesting, and easy to understand. The self-management project was engaging and applicable to our daily lives. I have already recommended this course and instructor to multiple other students and will continue to do so.

- It was a pleasure being in Karsten Loepelmann's class this semester. He was engaging, knowledgable, and funny in a cheesy way. His lectures were often thought-provoking and made me think critically about why people behave the way they do. Overall, I enjoyed his class which made me more knowledgeable in the field of psychology.

- Instructor was equally enthusiastic in both online and in person lectures.

- I love u leopelmann <3

(C'mon, tell me how you really feel! 😊)

- this professors conduct was completely unacceptable. Regardless of ones views on class matters, I don't believe that for a PSYCH course a professor should be so vocal about their political and social views. This professor even went to the extent of trying to enforce his own mandates in a public university. Now I don't disagree for or against policy as I understand this is a difficult time, the way he went about sending multiple emails and constantly giving his opinion made this feel like a political science course rather than being about behaviour change. At the start of the semester he was an average prof doing his best but towards the end he constantly made people feel uncomfortable and even made scenes during class regarding mask debates. I know many people that didn't attend class including myself for his antics. For a tenured and self proclaimed "great" professor, he should understand how to conduct himself in a professional manner and focus on course content.

(Just to be clear: I am not tenured, and I do NOT--and never have--declared myself to be "great." In certain circumstances, the real world invades into the classroom. I did not give my political views; I commented on how the UCP government overreached itself by secretly demanding that post-secondary institutions follow its policies to remove mask mandates. (Yes, it was the government. No, I won't tell you how I know--but I do know.) The governments of other provinces did not meddle like this; most other universities across Canada kept their mask mandates in place--some of them until June 30, 2022. My classroom is my workplace. I resent anyone telling me what to do or how to do it. The fact that the extremely well-paid people who work in central admin did not step up and support front-line workers is appalling. Like it or not, my political and social views seep into everything I do (and they, clearly do the same to you, judging by your comments). It's too bad that my "completely unacceptable" conduct upset you. It's important to me to keep myself safe and healthy, and students in my class, too. I will never apologize for doing that.)

- instructor was slow at times when back in person.

(Slow? Like, speaking slowly? Or, like, in the pejorative sense?)

- No feedback on the student’s performance on the course. Need to learn from our mistakes on the midterms. When TA asked for clarification during the midterm viewing, he did not offer any assistance. Not familiar with the material? Told to refer to Prof.

(Wha-? No feedback? You mean the ExamVis for midterm 1 and the in-person exam viewing for midterm 2 were not feedback? How about the feedback you got on the quiz questions after every lecture? How about the feedback on each assignment? As for the TAs, I wish they could have been more prepared, but I did answer any questions that were referred to me.)

- Lack of enthusiasm from the instructor, especially when we went back in person

- Class lectures were basically a regurgitation of the textbook - we all know how to read - please make it come alive.

- I also really enjoyed his obvious enthusiasm many of the topics and I thought the supplementary videos he provided were both interesting and informative. Cheers!

- Personally, I really like how Professor Loepelmann actively engage in this class. I can easily understand his teaching and he is accessible outside the class even when we're online. I will definitely recommend his class to anyone who is interested in this subject.

(*Sigh* Just, *sigh*)

- I found in his feedback he was overly condescending and as a result I had no desire to seek extra help.

- I wish I saw more compassion from him. It did not seem like he was ever happy to answer questions from students. This is why when I was unsure of something, I would resort to a classmate or even Google because I would get too anxious to ask him anything, afraid that he would be snappy with his answer (as he often was when answering questions on the discussion board). Wish he was more approachable in this way.

(I'm sorry if that's how I came across to you. It was probably the most difficult term I've ever had in over 25 years of teaching. Posting videos online while also teaching in person was immensely draining, to say nothing about the existential threat of Covid and the war in Ukraine. If you're referring to my responses in the discussion forum, I tried to answer questions as quickly and concisely as possible. It can be frustrating if someone is asking--yet again--a question that I've answered before, or is answered in the syllabus. I would never be "snappy" with any student in person. Here are some other perspectives:)

- Dr. Loepelmann is an incredibly passionate professor and made this course extremely engaging and enjoyable. He treats all his students with respect and it is evident that he knows this course inside out. I would recommend both him and this course to everyone.

- His presentations are clear and interesting, he never goes over the class time , and shows a clear respect for his students. I took this course as an option and I am so glad I did. I would 100% recommend this course and Dr. Loepelmann to anyone and everyone

- This class was absolutely phenomenal. The content itself was all extremely interesting and I was never left wondering how it would be applicable in the real world, as research and examples were consistent throughout. Although we did watch many videos and interpreted plenty of graphs, it never felt excessive. The self-management project was the perfect assignment to aid in course knowledge. Each section of the project felt appropriately spaced, and no part of the assignment felt too big to comfortably complete within our busy schedules. It truthfully felt like a learning opportunity rather than a tedious project with no purpose. Finally and perhaps most importantly, Professor Loepelmann was absolutely fantastic. Although we began the semester online (where many professors tend to flounder) Karsten made every effort to make the content enjoyable and accessible. And he exceeded all my expectations. He continued to post online resources even once we moved online because he understood that with COVID people’s situations readily change. Our abundance of resources (ePoll quizzes, and textbook quizzes) that we were able to access at any point throughout the semester were irreplaceable. It is very apparent that he genuinely cares about the quality of learning we receive. This has honestly been the greatest class I have ever taken at the UofA. Give this man another teaching award please!

(Thanks!) 

- I wish we were given some practice midterms and finals to prepare better for the exams. Also, not being to able to get our exam copies back was a horrible experience.

(You got:
 - dozens of poll questions based on lectures
 - five worksheets
 - multiple-choice questions from the textbook posted on eClass
 - dozens of practice tests, quizzes, and application/misapplication exercises from the textbook
But you still want more?
No, you did not get midterm 1 back. Sorry if that was, er, "horrible." But you did get extremely detailed feedback from ExamVis--more feedback than students have ever gotten in person. And there were multiple exam viewings for midterm 2.)

 

- Dr Loepelmann was literally my favourite prof this entire term. He's enthusiastic about this subject and it shows in his lectures and interactions with students. I will forever remember hearing Dr. Loepelmann screech when he got Big Mac sauce on his keyboard during a Q & A for this class. 100% comedy gold.

(That's your takeaway from the course? *sigh*)

Why aren't you studying?

The Remote Exams

I’m coming down to the last remote exams I’ll ever have to do. (I hope. I really, really hope.) If you’ve been in any of my remote classes, you’ll know that I have closed-book exams and use exam proctoring software and exam integrity software, and you’ll also understand the reasons why (I won’t go over them again here).

I don’t go through all of this hassle because it’s peaceful and relaxing. It is super stressful for students, but even more so for me. There is a lot that I have to do to prep, and I feel the weight of responsibility for each and every student on my shoulders. Here’s what’s involved behind the scenes.

At the start of term, I have to register the dates and times of my remote exams with eClass support so they can arrange to have support staff available. A couple of days before the exam, they’ll also check my Smart Exam Monitor (SEM) and ExamLock settings to make sure everything is okay. SEM is the proctoring software that uses AI to monitor students’ cameras and mics. It uses really, really bad AI. Shockingly bad. It flags almost every student for a violation. It takes an excruciatingly long time to go through each flagged student and make sure they are not actual violations. ExamLock is exam integrity software that takes screenshots of students’ screens to make sure they’re not running Google searches in another window. ExamLock is crashy, but seeing students’ screens can often help me troubleshoot problems--which are frequently caused by: ExamLock. It also flags around half the class for (nonexistent) violations, which means even more time clicking and clearing flags. It takes 2-3 hours overall to go through the software and clear all the flags.

A month before the exam, I have to coordinate with my wife. Yes, with my wife. She and I share parenting duties, including picking up and dropping off our kids at school. Well, schools actually--two different schools, which is why it takes both of us. This family coordination is required because some of my students have academic accommodations, most commonly that they receive extra time on exams. So even though an exam might start at, say, 2:00pm, it is possible that some students will still be writing their exam at 5:00. I’ve had a student who got 7 hours to write a 2-hour final exam. That’s right: 7 hours. This is why I have to coordinate schedules with my wife. She’s a family doctor, so she has to change her schedule and end her workday early enough to pick up both of our kids while I’m staring, sweating, at a computer screen. It’s hard enough for her patients to get an appointment to see her, but if I have a lot of exams, it’s even harder for them because of all the child-picking-up. So online exams require a lot of planning in my household. (Oh, and that 7-hour student? They didn’t show up for the final exam. So we had to rearrange our lives again around the 7-hour deferred exam. Which the student didn’t show up for either.)

First, I have to create an exam, for example a multiple choice exam, using my exam management software. I have to export the exam, then import it into eClass. For some reason, eClass does not keep the order of questions intact, but instead sorts the questions alphabetically. Yup, alphabetically. Questions that start with “A person experiences...” come first, and “Zookeepers demonstrate...” come last. (Why...just why?) I have to spend 20-60 minutes manually rearranging questions, depending on the number of questions on the exam.

Each student, though, gets the exam questions in a random order. Why do I have to rearrange them? In order to keep track of which questions are from chapter 1, chapter 2, etc. This lets another piece of software in eClass called ExamVis produce a detailed visualization of each student’s results. Without the proper sorting, nothing will make sense and ExamVis is useless.

Next, I have to set up a session for ExamLock, and another one for Smart Exam Monitor (SEM). Actually, I have to set up two SEM sessions: a regular one, and a backup in case someone encounters problems or accidentally closes out of the exam.

Then, I have to send out instructions to everyone on how to take the exam, even though I’ve made a video on how to use SEM with ExamLock. (This video is now used by eClass support in their knowledgebase article as a how-to. It’s my most popular video, with almost 5,000 views. I’m a YouTuber!) For those students who only have access to a ChromeOS device, I have to send out a different set of instructions, as ChromeOS cannot run ExamLock.

On the day of the exam, I have a whole checklist of things to do:
   _ have phone ready (a shared, on-call phone--not my personal cell)
   _ open SEM session (done manually, about 20 minutes before the exam is to start)
   _ hide lecture videos in eClass (no cheating!)
   _ remove lecture notes from my website (no cheating!)
   _ check eClass status (see below)
   _ check AWS status (Amazon Web Services is a cloud service that provides back-end storage and processing for eClass)
   _ check Shaw status and outages
   _ check Telus status and outages
Those last two are to see if there are any local internet outages. They are surprisingly frequent. Unfortunately, this only helps me see if there are local students who have problems. Some students are overseas with sketchy internet connectivity.

eClass never goes down, amirite? Cough. There was a major outage on December 11, 2020 that affected one of my classes. eClass was down for so long, the exam was eventually cancelled. Helpfully, every single student in the class emailed me to inform me that eClass was down. There is a protocol on what to do, given an exam disruption. Basically, the Faculty will move the exam to a Saturday. Needless to say, this is not a popular choice--with students, or with me. In the case of my class, each student was given an option to either retain their term mark and skip the final, or go ahead and write the final. In the end, 14 of 123 students actually decided to write the final exam.

When it comes to remote exams, some students are fully prepared--they’ve watched my  explainer video, set up the software, and tested everything by running the proctoring trial (for which I typically give a 1% bonus mark). If these students encounter an issue, they know what to do and can handle it well. Other students are not so prepared: they haven’t watched the video, set up the software, or tested it out--but they manage to successfully complete the exam. The issue for me is the small number of students who don’t know what to do or how to do it, are not prepared--and run into problems. What do I click? Where is it? What software? Who do I call?

I want to ensure a smooth process for everyone--even if they are a mere 1%. So I have given IST/eClass support some pretty harsh criticism over the past two years. There are problems like the “Black Screen of Death” that they say affects only 1-2% of students, so it’s not a big deal (this issue was not even described in any of their troubleshooting documentation). They got quite an earful from me about that. If you can’t fix a known problem, at least acknowledge that it exists and how to handle it.

The recent (and, sadly, continuing) brutal budget cuts have had negative effects across campus; the IST/eClass support team has not been spared. They have lost a great number of people. I get it. To be fair, they have responded to my complaints, even going so far as to set up Zoom meetings with me, and reaching out to my students who were affected by software problems in order to understand them better.

I know students don’t like proctoring software. I don’t either. I hope we’re all done with it for good.

Why aren’t you studying?

The Zero Textbook Cost

There's "free" as in speech, and there's "free" as in beer. Or, according to Wikipedia, gratis versus libre. This post is about free as in beer. (Sorry, no free beer will actually be made available. 🍺)

You might be familiar with the UAlberta SU's Be Book Smart initiative; this grew out of a national campaign years ago, protesting the high prices of textbooks. ("Grew" is probably not the right word, as the current initiative is much smaller in scope than the ambitious national campaign that kind of sputtered out.) Be Book Smart helps students know their options when it comes to textbooks (e.g., sharing books with friends, or looking for textbooks in the library). But it also provides information to instructors to raise awareness about the high costs of learning materials, and suggests lower-cost alternatives (e.g., using coursepacks, putting textbooks on reserve in the library, etc.).

Textbooks, however, are only one cost borne by students. Other learning materials also have a price. For example, some instructors require students to use online homework systems hosted by a commercial publisher. Of course, students have to buy an access code--just to do required homework! This strikes me as a bit of an over-reach.

I am mindful of the high cost of education. For 20 years, I have been using low-cost or no-cost alternatives in many of my courses. For example, instead of for-pay publisher-hosted online experiment websites, I have managed to find free alternatives like the American Psychological Association's Open Psychology Laboratory, which lets students run experiments and gather data--completely free. In some of my other courses, there is no required textbook, just a collection of readings in a coursepack. Even better, due to recent changes in copyright, I can make pdfs of these readings available to students for free.

An idea in academia that's gaining traction is that of Open Education Resources (or OERs). According to Wikipedia, these are "freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes." OERs include things like, well, Wikipedia. Completely free and open, and you can learn things from it.

In educational circles, however, OERs are most frequently brought up in the context of textbooks. Some people, out of the goodness of their hearts, have written textbooks--and have given them away, free. I have used one of these, by OpenStax, in my introductory psychology course (PSYCO 104). Although students were very happy to have a free textbook, I was disappointed in its quality. Sure, under the terms of the Creative Commons licence it was published under, I could have rewritten it--if I had a spare year or three. And although there are OER textbooks for introductory psychology, developmental psychology/lifespan development, abnormal psychology, research methods, cognitive psychology, and social psychology, OER textbooks are not available for all courses and topics. An increasing number of my colleagues are adopting OERs instead of commercial textbooks, and I'm on the lookout for high quality OER alternatives in the courses I teach.

Recently, the Office of the Registrar contacted instructors about a pilot project for the 2021-2022 academic year. They want to indicate to students in Bear Tracks which courses offer Zero Textbook Cost. I went through all six of my upcoming courses, and surprised myself to find that all of them qualify as ZTC. I do not require any paid online homework systems. I have coursepacks instead of textbooks as much as possible. And any required commercial textbooks in my courses have print copies on reserve at the library, or have ebooks available via the library website.

My hope is that by working towards Zero Textbook Cost I can help make education more accessible, and decrease financial strain on students. Do you have any other ideas that I can implement to save students money?

Why aren't you studying?

The Fall and Winter Terms: COVID-21?

Are you going back in person in the fall? This question has been on my mind a lot recently--likely on yours, too. As with everything COVID-related over the past year, I’ve been (hyper-)alert to changing conditions.

The Minister of Advanced Education (Alberta’s Quietest Cabinet Minister™) issued a press release on March 18 to “encourage all post-secondary institutions, students and families to prepare for a full return to on-campus learning this September.” Oh, but there wouldn’t be any extra funding or anything. How encouraging.

In response, the UAlberta President wrote a brief, vaguely worded blog post, emphasizing the importance of safety in the return to campus. Previously, the Provost made a more concrete commitment on February 23, promising that Bear Tracks would reveal which Fall classes would be online and which would be in person on April 26. In other words, not all classes would be in person.

The problem is that there was a bit of a gap: Who would be making the decision to be in person or not? Would individual instructors get to decide? Or would there be some kind of formula, like classes larger than 100 would be online, whereas smaller classes would be in-person in a big room to space people out? No information was provided to front-line instructors at all. No worries, though, I’m sure that would get sorted out in time. Right?

I found that the Office of the Registrar’s website made some promises on behalf of instructors in their 2021-22 Academic Year FAQs for Students (archived; originally posted February 24): “We know that there may be circumstances that prevent you from attending in-person. If this is your situation, please contact your instructor to make alternative arrangements to allow you to complete the course outcomes.”

Er, what? I’m going to digress on this for a bit. If I’ve committed to teaching in-person classes and a student gets sick with, oh I dunno, some kind of nasty virus, I would have to accommodate them. How exactly? One option is that I would then--in addition to teaching the course in person--also record separate lecture videos. That’s a big nope. There’s no way I would have enough time to do that. Then the only other option would require some capacity to record the live in-person lectures and post them online.

I had heard some rumours that classrooms would be outfitted with equipment to do this. It would require a webcam and microphone, as well as some video capture software. Just to be sure, however, I contacted IST about their plans for this. No one at IST knew of any plan, so my inquiry was bumped up until it reached the Associate VP and Chief Information Officer. (For some context, low-level people like me do not routinely have direct contact with people so much higher than my pay grade. So you can imagine my surprise.)

I was glad to hear that there are plans to outfit some classrooms with a camera, mic, and document camera, which would allow Zoom or Stream2 to record and/or stream content. However, “the actual timing is uncertain because the work requires time and effort by tradespeople, and their ranks have been decimated by the cuts. I wouldn't want to have you plan all summer for hybrid delivery, only to have those plans wrecked by labour uncertainties.” So, thanks again, Minister of Advanced Education, and the Government of Alberta. Thanks for nothing.

(I contacted the Registrar about the promises their FAQ made on my behalf, and two weeks later finally got a reply. The FAQs were being re-worded. As of this writing, the promise about “alternative arrangements” has been removed.)

In the meantime, I received an email from the person who coordinates teaching in the Department of Psychology. I had a week to decide (by April 1) which of my Fall and Winter term courses I would like to be in-person, and which would be taught remotely. I reached out to the Associate Chair of the Department, who didn’t have any more information to go on.

But what about students? It’s well-known that many students are struggling through the pandemic. (Hey, I know all about the struggle.) Yet, what if everyone wanted to continue remote learning? Or the opposite? This information would help inform my decision. I set up polls for my classes and asked if students wanted to go back a) in person, b) online, c) it doesn’t matter, or d) don’t know. Here are the results:

Ok, so it looks like a fair number of students would still accept the remote/online option. But an almost equal number would not.

This is like trying to solve one equation with 100 unknowns. For me, one issue is the painstakingly slow vaccine rollout (The Atlantic referred to it as “Canada’s Vaccine Mess”). If everyone could be fully vaccinated by September 1, this would not be such a concern. Another issue is the greater virulence of the COVID-19 variants. How effective are the vaccines against the variants? Another unknown. What about my kids? Will they be vaccinated by the fall, and should they go back in person? Unknown.

For what it’s worth, I made my decision: Remote teaching in the Fall (due to my inherent pessimism); in-person in the Winter (due to my inherent optimism).

Why aren’t you studying?

The COVID-versary

Today is March 12. It’s my COVID-versary. Like an anniversary, but with 'rona. (I’ve been lucky and careful, and have so far avoided actually getting COVID-19.) Thursday, March 12, 2020 was the last time I taught classes in person, on campus, in an actual classroom. Nothing special happened. My advanced perception class did not have a quiz (it was a skip week); I lectured on face perception. In my human factors and ergonomics, I lectured on APA style (boring) and groupthink (much more interesting). I picked up my eldest daughter from school, and asked her if she minded of we went to Best Buy on the way home. I had picked out a nice microphone and was getting worried that I’d need it soon--you know, with the way things were going. In fact, I’d need it the very next day.

On Friday, March 13 (ugh, Friday the 13th) at 12:33am, the University of Alberta sent out an email announcing that classes would be “temporarily suspended” that day. After fiddling with the setup of my mic--it did not like one of my USB ports--I recorded and posted a lecture video to YouTube in time for my regularly scheduled behaviour modification class. I was off and running. And it feels like I’ve been running ever since. On the morning of Saturday, March 14, the inevitable happened and classes were moved to emergency remote delivery. And that’s where we are today, a year later.

Looking back, here are some numbers that summarize my past year:

• lecture videos recorded: over 300
• emails handled/received/sent: ~9,600 (Probably over 10,000 if you include automated notifications about meetings, exams, etc. That's more than two dozen emails a day, on average.)
  
• Zoom meetings, seminars, and webinars attended: ??? (A lot. Really, really, a lot. I don’t even want to know how many. Got pretty familiar with all the video meeting software: Zoom, Google Meet, Skype, Webex, Facetime...)
• major awards won: 1 (William Hardy Alexander Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, 2020)
• awards that I nominated someone else for: 1 (my colleague Dr Jennifer Passey, who won the 2020 Remote Teaching Award)
• professional haircuts: 0
• haircuts by my wife (who is not a trained barber): like, 10? (I am NOT complaining. I think it’s amazing that in addition to being a physician, wife, and mother, she can also cut my hair so I look like a normal person.)
• things ordered online: around 100 (Not all from Amazon. I ordered most things from local businesses online that I picked up in-store or curbside. I try to buy local first if I can to support local businesses.
  
• online orders gone wrong: at least 5 (Just about everything that could go wrong did, with one exception: to my knowledge, no porch pirates stole any of my packages.)

Although I did pop in to my office a couple of times last spring, that was apparently prohibited (oops) so I have not returned in 11 months. There are no plants in my office, and on my last visit, I took home any perishable food. The last thing I want to see when I eventually return to my office is some infestation, like sentient plants, or sentient chocolate bars--or sentient plants that have survived by eating sentient chocolate bars. (Don’t laugh--I once had a mouse in my office.)

In the Before Times, I had a certain routine. I liked my routine; everything was...predictable. When the pandemic hit, that routine went out the window. Although we never had a true “lockdown” (just various restrictions), life was turned upside down. What to do but make a new routine:

• get up and make coffee (priorities, people!)
• get my kids up for online school
• shave, personal hygiene, etc. (It’s important--it makes you feel like an actual person. In the short term it depletes your willpower, but in the long run it builds it up.)
• get dressed: no sweatpants, no pajamas, no underwear-only days--ever! (Again, doing things like getting dressed signal that things are happening; it gives you some purpose.) On the other hand, I don’t wear ties anymore. (Ok, just on special occasions.)
• get to work: check email first for fires that have to be put out, and disasters that have erupted overnight; send messages that I forgot yesterday (oops); check eClass message forums
• then, it’s lunchtime, signaled by one of my daughters arriving at my desk announcing “Lunchtime!” Yes, lunchtime. That’s how long it takes me to deal with email: basically the entire morning.
• Spend lunch with kids. Difficult times can create opportunities. I don’t want this all to go by and all I have to show for it is...work. We eat and talk and joke. Then, back to work!
• record lecture videos: I try to be ahead by a class or two. Some of my colleagues have recorded lecture videos for an entire course over the summer. I thought I would do that, too. Ha! is all I have to say to that.
• Throughout the day, there are problems. There are always problems. (Like the day the power went out. Hey kids, no school! Luckily, I had already uploaded my lecture video for the day and just had to flip the switch to activate it, using my cell phone.) Over the months, the technical issues have decreased, but there are phone calls to make or answer, appointments to take kids to, snow to shovel/grass to mow.
• My wife will come home in the late afternoon, which is my signal to log off for a while. Mostly, it’s a signal to WHERE IS DINNER!? WHAT are we EATING!? Oh, the drudgery of making dinner. I don’t mind cooking, as long as it doesn’t take hours of standing and washing/peeling/chopping. Most days, I’m a put-the-ribs-in-the-oven-for-3-hours or slow-cooker-meat-and-veggies guy. Or, “It’s only -10 C out, that means firing up the grill outside!” When you’re at home all day, your spouse may come to the incorrect conclusion that all you’re doing is cooking dinner all day. You must disabuse your spouse of this notion. I wish she read this blog. Sigh.
• After dinner is another bit of routine. We go for a walk as a family. After sitting on my butt for literally hours, my back is aching and I need to move around. There is a pack of coyotes living in our neighbourhood, so we try to go for our walk as early as possible. Sunny summer days are great. Dark, cold, snowy winter evenings when the windchill is -20 C are not so great. Any colder than -25 and I’m staying inside with my sore back and a mug of hot something with a splash of adult beverage in it.
• Fridays we order takeout and have it delivered, again to help support local businesses. We don’t want our favourite restaurants to disappear! Cố Đô Huế forever!
• Sometime we have family game night. I don’t think that would have happened had there not been a pandemic. (Silver linings?)

My kids have, by objective measures, been doing pretty well with their online school. Some members of my family have concerns about COVID-19 due to certain health conditions, so we all decided together that the kids would not go in person when the schools reopened. Subjectively, though, it’s been hard. Motivation is tough. Not seeing peers is tough (there’s only so much interaction you get playing Among Us for the millionth time). My eldest daughter has now been doing high school at home for longer than she was at her actual high school. Will that be something she will look fondly back on in 10 years? Doubtful. On top of my IT duties and role as cook, I also have to be the family psychologist. Unfortunately, I’m not a “real” psychologist, so this is one of the most difficult aspects of this WFH situation. I do what I can. Sometimes it’s just sitting and talking. I hope it’s enough.

I’m not a teaching robot. (Once I was called a “teaching ninja” by my Department Chair which was pretty cool.) All of this is wearing on me, too. I have to plan, record, and upload videos. I have to answer the never-ending flood of questions. I hear from students who have gone through all kinds of unimaginable difficulties, including death, disease, and abuse. There are days when I can’t even.

And I’m not alone. This recent report done by The Chronicle of Higher Education reveals that most faculty are feeling anxiety, frustration, and stress. More than half are considering changing careers, or even retirement. Me too: one of the seminars I signed up for over the summer was retirement planning. The way the Government of Alberta is funding (or rather, NOT funding) higher education, I may have to retire sooner than I expect.

Now there’s the imminent prospect of vaccination and the hope for a return to normal life. It can’t come soon enough.

Screw you, COVID.

Why aren’t you...oh, nevermind. I’m sure you’re doing your best.

What I Did on my Summer Vacation (2020 COVID Edition)

I write these “what I did during my summer vacation” posts every year, and I know there’s a certain sameness to them. Well, not this year! *heavy sigh*

To a large extent, I was ready for the pandemic. The first mention of an “unusual flu” caught my eye in the news in late December. I had paid close (horrified) attention to the SARS outbreak almost 20 years ago, and lived through the (fairly frightening) H1N1 pandemic (yes, it is classified as a pandemic) in 2009. During the latter, I stood in a line of hundreds of people for hours with my family to get immunized. My youngest daughter was still a baby. It was a sobering experience.

After that, I made sure we had a good supply of hand sanitizer, much of which I still had when it was otherwise impossible to find this spring. I dug into closets and cabinets, surprised to find how many containers remained after 10 years. I even had the foaming dispenser in my university office. So when the situation began spiraling out of control in China, I began to prepare. Let me be clear that I did stockpile important supplies, but I did not hoard anything. (What’s the difference? Stockpiling implies that you are storing things that you will later use; hoarding suggests that you have so much, you will never need or use them.)

Remember the whole toilet-paper shortage thing?

I spent early March getting ready for remote delivery, reading reviews of high-quality mics and webcams. By the time in-person classes were “temporarily suspended” on March 13, I already had a lecture video ready to go for my class on the 13th. How seriously did I take this? Let’s just say that some people treated the movie Contagion as entertainment--I took it as a training film.

Being the designated household IT guy, I had to help my wife set up her Zoom meetings and troubleshoot my kids’ Google Meetings for school. I upgraded our home internet, doubling the speed. Knowing that I’d be spending even more time than usual sitting at my computer, I tried to make my setup as ergonomically correct as possible. (Are you feeling sore after being at your computer for too long? Check out the recording of the Faculty of Rehab Med’s webinar on five tips to create a healthy workspace.)

This is what you get when you leave your phone
lying around and tell your kids not to touch it.

After rounding out the challenging Winter term, I was plunged immediately into Spring term with only a day or two to prepare. I learned a lot, very quickly, from being dropped into the deep end. My colleagues also rallied in an amazing way. I’ve been in more teaching-related meetings via Zoom in the past two months than in the past two years. (Thanks, too, to students in that spring term class who were incredibly patient, understanding, and gave great feedback.)

With spring term over, I could finally relax, right? Do what I heard that other people were doing during the lockdown? Binge-watch The Witcher? Learn how to knit? Sing opera to my neighbourhood? Nope. As usual, I worked. Among other things:

• learned about and prepared for more remote teaching (note that there is are important differences between emergency remote teaching and online learning)
• served as external examiner for an MSc student
• Zoomed (it’s a verb now, right?) with colleagues across the university on an interrupted research project evaluating and redesigning a cognitive aid used in neonatal resuscitation

It has been a difficult time--for me, as for everyone. What do you do when the daily routine you have relied on has been shattered? You mourn the old one. And you create a new one. Having a defined structure to the day helps. You don’t have to decide what to do. You don’t have to burn through your precious, limited motivation and willpower. You just follow your routine. Every day, I get out of bed, shave, get dressed, have a coffee (not in that order). Spend the morning working. Take a break and make lunch for my kids. Eat lunch standing up. Go back to work. After the first wave crested, we were even brave enough to order food delivery (however, we treat the packaging like it’s radioactive).

Although I had a lot of work to do, I didn’t want life to pass me by, either. I won’t have this opportunity together with my kids again, so I wanted to make the most of it. In the evening, after spending too much time at our computers, we’d all go for a walk as a family. (There were so many great supportive chalk messages and pictures on driveways.) Then we’d watch a movie together, like Trolls World Tour, Onward, Hamilton, Batman Begins. Or play board games. Or Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

My memories of this time will include making Dalgona coffee (a.k.a. quarantine coffee or covid coffee). All the baking (pretzels, cupcakes, cheese buns, banana bread, nalysnyky, green onion cakes, and so many cookies).

Nalysnyky: Ukranian cottage cheese-filled crepes. 

And the “vacation” we had: a day trip to Lacombe. My old home town only had only one active case of COVID-19, so it felt very safe--like we were on a pandemic-free planet. (Yes, we all wore masks the whole time.) We did some shopping at the Lacombe Centre Mall, including scoring two dozen cannoli from Sweet Capone's. It turns out that after five months, the whole family was shopping-deprived.

Cannoli: Italian cream-filled pastries.

Now, I can feel the weather turning cooler. There are more leaves on the ground. Yeah, it’s time. Time to go back to work and school. But it’s going to be strange going back without leaving the house.

I know that many people are struggling--emotionally, financially, and not least of all, health-wise. My family has been lucky, and careful. I now have five different face masks, among them an X-Men one and a Ravenclaw one. I don't have these because they look cool. My wife is a front-line health care worker who is concerned for her patients' health, and for her own and her family's. My kids haven't given their auntie a hug in five months. I haven't come closer than 2 metres to my elderly parents; I don't want to give them a virus that could kill them. We've all lost things this year, but maybe we've also gained some perspective...on what's important.

Stay safe, everyone.

Why aren’t you studying?

The Remote Delivery

What a long strange trip it's been. TBH, it hasn't even been that long--just 3 weeks at this point. But it seems like forever ago that UAlberta announced that it was "preparing" to move to online delivery of courses (it was actually March 12). To show how fast things moved, literally the next day it was abruptly announced that classes were suspended, and then the day after that we were told to move to "remote delivery" of courses. (Note that remote teaching is not the same as online learning.)

Although it was announced that in-person classes were suspended on "lucky" Friday the 13th of March and were to resume with remote delivery on Tuesday, March 17th, I was prepared for this. Having kept an eye on the effects of COVID-19 across the world since late December, I already had a webcam for my office computer, and bought a new microphone right before they sold out across the city and online. My mic is a Blue Yeti Nano. (It's not the Wirecutter's top pick, but it's cheaper, smaller, and still pretty good--and way better than a crummy cellphone or laptop mic. Why spend money on an expensive mic instead of an expensive HD webcam? Research has shown that impressions of content are strongly influenced by audio quality.)

The green ring means we're go!

Because I've never recorded my lectures or taught an online, hybrid, or blended course before, I also had to decide on lecture capture software. The plan was to go through some of the different options, evaluate them, and pick the best. But because the landscape was changing so fast, I wasn't able to do that--I just went with the one recommended by my colleague Dr Jenn Passey: Screencast-O-Matic. I bought it the day before Loom (one product on my shortlist) announced they were offering their product for free to educators. The day after that, IST announced that they were making some lecture capture tools available for free: Stream2 (which I had never heard of), and Zoom (which I knew had serious existing privacy and security issues). Again, things were moving fast.
 
If I had waited, I wouldn't have had to spend any money and I could have carefully weighed the pros and cons of all the options--but I couldn't wait. It was important for me to have continuity for my classes. In a time of uncertainty, I wanted students to be able to rely on me. I hope I've been able to make the transition from in-person to remote teaching as smooth as possible.

 Note to my kids: daddy's busy!

UAlberta's The Quad blog recently featured some work-from-home photos of UAlberta employees. It was interesting to see the diversity of setups people have. I'm lucky to have an actual home office. Some people are working at their kitchen table, rec room, or in their windowless basement. Although that might get the job done, the ergonomics of it makes me cringe. (Here's a checklist for your desk setup, courtesy of Edmonton-based ergonomic company EWI Works.)

I miss being in front of a class, experiencing the energy of students. One law professor went viral with the Zoom videos of him teaching to a Pinocchio doll in an empty classroom. I'm comfortable doing my lectures in front of my computer, but like the law prof I'm not alone. Somehow I've managed to accumulate a variety of, um, companions? Apparently my wife has a thing for buying me cute hedgehogs (no, I don't know why). The blue M&M on the right is actually a computer screen cleaner. And then there's Hack & Slash for some '90s nostalgia.

Say hello to my little friends.

Next up, I'm teaching a spring class that's going to be remote delivery. I don't know what's going to happen come September. That seems too far in advance to even consider. Until classes resume in person and life gets back to normal, take care of yourselves!

Why aren't you studying?