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What are your workdays like nowadays? How are you spending your time in this time of COVID-19?
If I were to describe my work life nowadays in a word, that word would be “Zoom.” My days consist of back-to-back-to-back Zoom meetings.
The switching from one Zoom meeting to another has taught me a couple of things: A) make your lunch early in the morning, before the first Zoom meeting starts. B) When you eat in front of Zoom, it is OK to turn off your camera.
The other virtual place that staff on my campus -- not so much faculty -- are finding themselves is Slack. For the teams working with professors to move to and support remote learning, Slack seems to have become the dominant platform of communication. Do you see something similar?
Going back to Zoom, COVID-19 is the world’s greatest synchronous meeting training system ever devised. We are all getting very good at collaborating over synchronous online meetings.
I wonder if COVID-19 will break some of the habits of face-to-face meetings, and that when we finally return to campus, we will keep up the practice of meeting virtually.
One technique that we have discovered for Zoom meetings is for everyone in the discussion to throw their agenda items into the chat. Things are still moving so quickly that nobody has time to write and share agendas before the meetings.
An unexpected joy of everyone working at home and meeting on Zoom are the glimpses of the home lives of colleagues. It is so fun when the kids make an unexpected cameo on the webcam.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to homeschool one’s children while also working remotely at the feverish pace that we are all working.
It is an incredible lift to pivot a residential university to a remote learning operation in a matter of days. How my colleagues are managing to keep their children’s schooling going, while also keeping our universities going, is a mystery to me.
Another unexpected joy of everyone working remotely is the pets. We have lots of cats now joining Zoom meetings. Today I learned how loudly a bulldog snores.
Nobody is troubled by screaming infants or barking dogs. We’ve all gotten good at muting our microphones.
My home is not only where I do my work -- it is where three college students are now continuing their studies. Two daughters and a boyfriend have moved in for the duration of the pandemic.
It will be interesting to see how well my home’s Wi-Fi can cope with all the synchronous meetings, recorded lectures and live online classes.
The house is now a classroom, residence hall and dining facility. College students consume a fantastic amount of food.
At some point, the pace of work will slow down. It has to. Everyone who works for a college or university now finds themselves in an all-hands-on-deck effort to transition to remote teaching.
The pivot to supporting remote learners, which is now every student, will, if anything, be more time/people/resource-intensive than the transition to remote teaching.
It is hard to see when higher ed work life will shift from the emergency scramble to some sort of normal. When do you think that will happen?
For my household, I wonder when the novelty of everyone working at home together will wear thin? The dog, at least, is enjoying having everyone at home.
What is your daily work life like in this age of COVID-19?
