Is There Anybody Out There? - Online courses and the need for connecting to students
Working from home and taking online courses are not new phenomena, but the COVID-19 global crisis made them household topics for all of us. Online courses saved our winter term (thanks to the great collaboration of instructors and students, and support from the university), and they are going to stick around for summer and possibly fall terms. They may even become a more significant and permanent part of our educational system. As we try to solve all logistic issues to move our courses online (and turn off our video streams to hide our messy hair and pyjamas), we may overlook something essential: the need for human connections and interactions. The university community is planning and sharing experiences on how to run our courses online. Among many suggestions, one being raised increasingly is to avoid synchronous sessions. It is a good one that I have advocated myself ( https://carleton.ca/edc/welcome-to-my-online-classroom ). We should not assume the students are physically and men