I hope everyone is staying safe and has been able to find some enjoyment in staying home. We’ve been watching disaster movies on Netflix at my house the past few evenings and, while it’s possibly not the best choice for our mental health during these anxious times, it’s fun and sort of reassuring that disaster movies usually have some kind of happy ending.

Online class meetings

After trying out a few different videoconferencing options for our Monday/Wednesday 8am lessons, I’ve settled on a product called Webex. You don’t need an account and you don’t need to download the app to join the video sessions (you can join meetings from your browser with a meeting link and password) but your experience will be a bit better if you are able to download the (free) app to your computer or your phone and create a (free) account. Whether you use the app or the website, you’ll need internet access, a webcam, and a quiet place (if you don’t have these things, please send me an email and we’ll figure something else out). You can even participate in the audio part of a class meeting from your phone using a phone number and PIN.

I’ve set up a recurring Webex meeting from 8:00am to 11:00 am on Mondays and Wednesdays. This will cover our usual class meeting from 8:00am to 9:40am as well as office hours after class. I’ll take attendance as usual. If you need to, you can join the meeting late.

I plan on recording these sessions and sharing the links to the recordings on the OpenLab for you to review later.

Please see the details for our practice sessions (aka Meet the Pets!) on Wednesday (tomorrow) here.

We’ll see how Webex goes for the first few weeks. It should be free for 90 days, which is long enough for us. If it’s not working for us, we can try something similar like Zoom or Blackboard Collaborate.

Edit 3/19: Please see this page for meeting links in Webex, Blackboard, and Zoom.

Pre-class Prep Lessons

At this point, I’m not planning on giving full lessons during our 8am video meetings. Instead, I’ll prepare some reading material and links to short videos for you to read and watch before class. Then during our video meetings, I can give a mini-lession and go over any questions that came up in your preparation or examples you’d like to see in more detail.

Please stay tuned for more pre-class prep lesson posts on the OpenLab. You can see the first one from last week here. I’ll collect these pre-class prep lesson posts and add a button to the menu at the top of our OpenLab site.

Quizzes and Tests

Yes, there will still be quizzes and tests. I’ll post more details about how you will take them soon. For now, make sure you’re keeping up with your Webwork assignments.

As usual, please send me an email if you have any questions or concerns. There are still many things I don’t know about how the rest of the semester will go, but I will let you know everything I do know.