I'm not REALLY teaching online, but as part of the "uniformity" push in our gen-eds, we're all being required to generate online homework using the text book publisher's website.
And then link them to our BlackBoard page for the course.
The homeworks are supposedly auto-graded, which means less work on the back end for me. But I am currently at the point where I get a headache every time I try to do one. The first time I had to get a younger, hipper colleague to show me all the virtual buttons to push. This time, I did it on my own.....and BlackBoard promptly coughed an error up at me. (Apparently that was BlackBoard's fault, not mine.....which is another issue, these kinds of things have enough inherent unreliability that it worries me that one or the other will go down for an extended period when I am supposed to be doing something)
Anyway, it didn't automatically load up for my second section (which it did earlier), so I went through the string of button-mashing to load it up. Two thoughts:
1. When you have to make something allegedly idiot-proof, it annoys the daylights out of the non-idiots. I was yelling at the website because I had to click three separate things to get the homework to actually upload.
2. When a computer program asks me "Are you SURE you want to do that" after I've already clicked "OK" I feel like I want to say to it, "You are not my mother and I am not sixteen and trying to go to a high school dance in fishnets and a short skirt!"
Again I ask: why can't we just do pencil-and-paper homeworks like people have done since Plato was a pimply adolescent? Why so many danged bells and whistles?
I'm sure it will get easier but right now it's just a huge pain.
2 comments:
My neighbor's granddaughter is "home schooled", although I really can't understand her version of it to be valid. Neither of her grandparents (she lives with them) are teacher-qualified for homeschooling. She says she does all her lessons online and... well, basically that's it. Kind of weird for me, having grown up in the physical classroom era.
She says it's because she's "too advanced" for "regular" schooling.
My guess is she was booted for the final time. Based on observation. And gossip.
They do like to gossip out here in the backwoods.
I find anything that is "idiot proof" never works for me. Also the word intuitive. I hate that word. I never find what they say will be intuitive that way at all. I loathe all newish products for those reasons. THEY NEVER WORK like they say they will on the tin.
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