Preparing to Teach

Whenever I know a project is about to start, I work hard on preparation. If I am going to teach courses, the first thing I want to know is what courses I am to teach. It takes three hours of preparation for every hour of lecture when one starts teaching a new course. Another point in my style is to put a lot of effort up front in a project and be coasting by the time the project ends. (In this case, when the courses start.) Whenever a project team coasts at the beginning and tries to put in exponential effort at the end, the result is incompleteness and poor quality.

In the case of this particular assignment, I do not yet know what courses I am to teach, nor even to which department I will be assigned. With less than two months to go before departure, I am concerned. Still, there are things I can do.

From what I have been reading, the Internet in Ethiopia is expensive and of poor quality. Such is the case in many developing nations.  The work in Zimbabwe led to a process for developing courses entirely from high-quality open-access material so that the material could be distributed entirely on DVD or through a local network. This work also resulted in a publicly-available prototype capability for meta-searching open-access publications (https://www.igi-global.com/article/accessing-quality-open-access-literature-to-enable-teaching-learning-and-industry/204502, http://informationanthology.net/Open-Access-Search.html).  The two courses developed for the Chinhoyi University of Technology can be put again on DVD for potential use at University of Gondar. I can also gather and organize material from other courses I have prepared or taught. All of that is recordable on DVD.

Let me bring Saylor Foundation to your attention (https://www.saylor.org), an organization I discovered after returning from Zimbabwe. Through Saylor Academy they develop and make available college-level public-domain courses. These are developed by established professors and lecturers entirely from high-quality public-domain material (a subset of open-access). One can download entire courses for non-commercial redistribution. (Be sure to retain attribution.) Their course material is entirely compatible with Moodle’s course management system (https://docs.moodle.org/33/en/Main_page). Moodle is free to download and use. It is very popular. Whereas the courses I created are designed for on-ground classrooms and formal lectures, Moodle is designed for online learning. These two approaches need not be incompatible. Saylor course material can easily be adapted for access from one’s computer, without internet connection. See this article for background. It is not a problem to put Saylor course material onto stand-alone DVDs, while still using Moodle.

For the public-service side of things (career mentoring), the entire contents of my website can be put on DVD. At issue with that idea is the numerous links to internet material. However, there is considerable material on disk, or can be made that way. In particular, the site contains an adapted version of a career-exploration DVD set. This set includes a career assessment and numerous videos on various career fields, all public domain. The DVD set can be resurrected and prepared for distribution.

Lots can be done to prepare for potential courses and mentoring. That is what I will be working on until the assignment comes into better focus.