If you’re looking for time-honored wisdom and erudite insights regarding how to proceed in this plague semester…you might want to look elsewhere.

This is mostly about how I managed (or failed to manage) the transition to an online course to finish out Spring 2020. A little background:  I’m teaching Math 1006 (college algebra) to a group of about 35 students.  The students did not sign up for an online class, nor did I sign up to teach one, so when CUNY suspended on-campus classes in response to COVID-19, these students (and myself) were plunged into a totally unexpected situation.

We (my students and myself) started with a slight advantage: we’d been using an online homework platform (MyOpenMath) and polling platform (Kahoot), so they had some familiarity with remote instruction.  And I have my own set of lecture videos, which cover subjects from prealgebra to cryptography and differential equations, so I’m no stranger to putting material online.  And during Winter 2020, I had the distinction of teaching the first ever online math class at Brooklyn College (as well as being one of the first ever intersession math teachers).

But remember:  the students of Spring 2020 didn’t sign up for an online class.  So even though the Winter 2020 online class was, by any reasonable standard, successful, that success couldn’t translate into “best practices” for the Spring 2020 online class. So what does?  We’ll find out…  

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