We’re now a part of a growing community of professors exiled to our homes, collectively reimagining course delivery and assessment. Hitesh Doshi recently commented on our “eerie silence” about the pedagogical and logistical challenges that he knows we’re all thinking about. The subject also came up in a recent New York Times article: what will we do to serve students who don’t have ready access to functioning technology; what are we implying about the value of classroom teaching in our acceptance of stopgap virtual learning?

As always I’m conflicted. I’m actually looking forward to having students in one course devise personalized videos to replace classroom presentations, but I also worry about anyone who will be forced to scramble to find the means to produce them. Then there are the lost opportunities that we take for granted in the classroom: the project groups that ask important questions because something we said prompts a realization that a requirement was misunderstood.

Doubtless this odd episode will be fodder for research, but that knowledge does little to alleviate anxiety about the decisions we need to make now.