So my college-student daughter is home for the quarantine and attending Zoom university while I'm teaching it. She said something really interesting last night: "Some professors make it really easy to learn"

For her, what that meant was classes in which there were many opportunities to learn in different ways: lectures, discussions, course material like the powerpoint slides, textbooks--and the ones she likes most are ones where all of these are available but not required

Partly this availability of resources is a function of labor: there are TAs and the profs have relatively few classes, so they can devote plenty of time to running live Zoom lectures and discussions each week

Let's note that this is UC Santa Cruz, an institution that has denied cost of living adjustments to its grad students and pays them pitifully, leading them to strike (with support from undergrads), at which point many were fired, losing their health insurance

More directly relevant for me is that emphasis on different opportunities. Now, I don't have the labor available to do the different things her classes are doing; I'm basically drowning at trying to keep my pared-down classes functioning

But her point about different opportunities for learning is a really good and important one, not one I'd thought of before. I have often considered how instructors are curators in a way, but my curation was tightly wound, a clearly delineated body of content

Maybe online teaching requires a more porous boundary between "class content" and "not class content"? Or a less tightly wound curation of content, so students can approach it in different ways