Where I’m at with the lecture course (oh, and the book is in!)

A colleague just wrote to ask where I’m at with my intro course. My friends are posting (or writing) about the technologies they are trying out, etc. Here is where I am at as of today. I have too many readings in most places and not enough in a few. Podcast lectures drop on Thursday. …

Resources for Teaching Online

My department (Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University), got together and did a little skillshare on teaching online. Or rather, we broke into groups, people did homework, and then reported back. The resulting document is our best attempt to produce something useful for ourselves. It still leaves open questions about office hours and other …

Why I hate WebCT, Part III

This is part of an <a href=”http://superbon.net/?p=599″>ongoing</a> <a href=”http://superbon.net/?p=612″>series</a>.   Coursepacks are due at the bookstore in mid July, and so I thought I’d get my big course together on time for a change, since I only require a few changes.  So I started plotting out my calendar for the year.  I go into WebCT …

Academic Labor Politics in the Air

It must be the season or something. Today, our TA union staged a demonstration outside the front gates in support of their ongoing contract negotiations. McGill teaching assistants are quite underpaid compared to their counterparts at other Canadian universities and “R1” universities in the U.S. It’s a Quebec thing, since they’re better paid than TAs …

Why I Hate Mercury

No, not the planet. It’s cool. Mercury is the name for McGill’s online student course evaluation system. For most of my career as a teacher, there has been a day at the end of the term when students have filled out course evaluation forms, commenting on the instruction, their impressions of the course, and other …