Transitioning my Calculus course to Online, plus some baseball cards from Bob!

Yesterday marked our first official day "back in session" for college.  Like many colleges across the country, my school gave everyone a second week of spring break in order to allow all the professors to move the remainder of their course online.  Our college has opted to then extend our semester by an extra week so we technically won't lose any instructional time.

I say "technically" because with the shift to online learning we actually lose a ton of instructional time.  As you probably know, I teach math which is a subject that's rather tricky to learn online.  Furthermore, this semester my course load has Calculus I with a corresponding lab (we use Mathematica).  I can't force my students to buy that program on their own at home and so I had to basically ax the lab component for the remainder of the semester.  

All that said, even with the cutbacks I'm happy to do what I can for my students.  I actually think many of them are happy to have some sort of normalcy as well, though for the seniors losing out on the last half of their senior year is definitely a heartbreak (and it might be even worse if graduation gets cancelled, something that is looking more and more likely with every passing day).

For now though, I'm happy with the fact that I got the first week's worth of materials all online.  I ended up using my in-class PowerPoints and recording a voice lesson for each slideshow.  I've also recorded some video updates for my students (posted on YouTube).  For assignments, I've used our course management software (we use Moodle) to create online quizzes and exams.  Finally, I've posted a number of extra answer keys as well as additional practice problems (and some video solutions of me solving certain problems).  It's not perfect but I think all of the resources are there for students to succeed if they so choose.  Oh yeah, I also set up some tutoring sessions via Skype.  

As for the baseball cards scattered throughout this post?  Well, they all came in a surprise envelope from blog reader Bob.  While the cards I scanned are all awesome, the real prize of that particular PWE was this:

That's a Press Proof parallel of Barry Larkin (numbered 21/25).  I don't own very many numbered Larkin cards - and very few at all of cards numbered 25 or less.  Thus, this is much, much appreciated and made for a nice prize to tuck into my binder tonight after a full day of online work!