My university, the University of Manitoba, started its Fall term this week, and with rare exceptions, all teaching will be done remotely and online. While I am truly grateful that I can continue to work safely from home during the coronavirus pandemic, this change comes with a completely different set of challenges from the in-classroom teaching that I usually do at this time of year.
Most of my time (including evenings and weekends) is now being taken up by preparing and delivering instruction for students on how to use my university library system, all of which is being delivered remotely and online, using Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. In some cases, I am using the technology for the first time.
Today, the librarians at the Sciences and Technology Library launched a brand new, for-credit course on information skills for undergraduate science students, which my colleagues and I will be team teaching over the Fall 2020 semester, using Cisco Webex within the University of Manitoba’s learning management system:
If you’re curious, here are our course objectives for the 13-week course:
In short, I will be quite busy with work at my full-time job as an academic librarian (the one that pays the bills and keeps the lights and the internet on!). So I will be working a lot of overtime, which means, unfortunately, that something has to give.
Therefore, while I may have officially returned from my self-imposed vacation from blogging, my blogposts here on the RyanSchultz.com blog will be much less frequent than usual over the next couple of months. I’m sorry, but I hope that by the end of October, things will settle down for me a little bit.
Thanks in advance for your understanding, support, and forbearance. I promise I will be back covering social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse at my former pace just as soon as I am able!
Given Ryan’s past history of taking a break from posting, I suspect he’ll reduce things down to only one or two posts every other day!! 😉