Where is our Zoom link?

I will get this question several times during the semester. “I have to be absent on Friday. What’s the Zoom link for that class session?”

There isn’t any.

During the pandemic quarantines, we got used to the idea that “going to class” meant turning on the computer and logging in (and often it meant turning off the camera and microphone and leaving the room). It was pretty rare for those sessions to be very productive or educational, and every teacher I know agrees that those Zoom students really didn’t do too well.

Setting up a Zoom session so I can do a “talking head” presentation from home is pretty simple, but doing a classroom session is much more complicated. (When I taught at the University of Akron, I did two semesters of similar teaching, and the university supplied a technical assistant to simply manage the equipment and software for the whole class session.)

So the answer to the question is that we don’t have a Zoom session for every class period. Almost all the material is available on Blackboard, so if you keep up with that, you won’t suffer too much from missing a class.

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