This was supposed to be a yard-work weekend but the sky fell and the creek rose and I can't mow with standing water in the meadow, so I guess I'll stay inside and try to plant a class.
Or transplant it, I suppose. I'm working on transforming an upper-level nature writing course from a face-to-face format to online, condensing 15 weeks of material into 8 without losing anything important. This delicate process will require much more than just uprooting the syllabus and plopping it into new ground; making a course grow in a new and different medium will require careful preparation, fertilization, watering, weeding, and pruning.
So far I've done little more than plot out the sections, but this week I'll start inserting learning modules into Moodle (reading and writing assignments, discussion questions, photographs, and audio recordings), all without knowing whether enough students will register to justify offering the class this summer. Will my carefully planted course produce results or simply shrivel up and die?
It's the same sort of question I ask about my garden every summer: Will the okra flower, the beans sprout, the sweet potatoes send out vines? Will blight kill the tomatoes or raccoons devour the sweet corn? Do you think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?
One thing is certain: the rain won't hurt the online course. It'll just give me a good excuse to stay inside and tend my technological garden.
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