Teaching, Research, and Service...Remotely??? The Present and Future of a Virtual Academic Life

By: Haydee Lindo, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Williams  College @haydeelindo, Anisah N. Nu’Man, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Spelman College, @_nudoc_ 

This global pandemic has shaken our lives more than we could have possibly anticipated. Our focus at this time should be our mental and physical health, and the well-being of the people in our lives. As we struggle to understand the full scope of this tragedy and to adjust to what may be a new normal, we are also beginning to realize the many ways in which our work expectations have changed and the many ways in which they will probably stay the same.  It is unfortunate that we are not all so well-positioned as to be able to focus solely on our health and families during this time; as academics, at many different types of institutions, we continue to be responsible for teaching, research, and service during the global pandemic and we’ve had to modify these responsibilities in order to continue our work remotely. All said, we must not only attend to the current crisis but the longer-lasting effects on our profession and professional lives.

Given the WHO and CDC projections of the pandemic, there are already concerns that educational institutions that are typically in-residence may continue to educate remotely for the Fall 2020 semester. For example, Boston University is publicly considering this option. There are many great resources from the MAA, AMS, and elsewhere, about taking face-to-face courses online mid-semester. As we make this transition, suddenly and haphazardly, realize that we are developing modes of educating we may very well need in the future. If we can, we must use this current semester as a time to learn. We should grow our skills and become more versatile, effective, and digitally inclusive educators, even if things go back to “normal” in the coming months. 

Teaching well online requires a different type of preparation and the development of a different set of skills than we use to teach in-person courses. Of course, there are people who - tongue in cheek - encourage us not to do a good job during this transition. To be clear, there is absolutely no doubt that we all want to do right by our students. However, in The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning, Hodges et al point to the growing debate and clear distinction between the remote teaching we are implementing now and online learning, properly executed.

“Many active members of the academic community, including some of us, have been hotly debating the terminology in social media, and "emergency remote teaching" has emerged as a common alternative term used by online education researchers and professional practitioners to draw a clear contrast with what many of us know as high-quality online education.” 

Still, there are legitimate fears that institutions will now downsize their teaching staff, or transition smoothly from thinking of online teaching as an emergency-time accommodation to a normal expectation of the job. Ask yourself, would you be prepared for such an outcome?

In the best of times, we often struggle to maintain a research program while attending to our teaching; now we must add the anxiety of the world-wide health crisis and the added time constraints from needing to teach remotely. As the crisis continues and the scope of economic fallout comes into focus,  it is reasonable to expect that institutions may have to implement hiring freezes and restrictions in funding for research and travel. Many have already done so. 

How do we continue engaging in research under these new time, economic and physical constraints? Fortunately, there are certain things we already do that are suited to our new circumstances. Nowadays, mathematical research is often conducted with collaborators many miles apart. For POC academics, we have also had some practice maintaining and creating mentorship relationships with mathematicians at distant institutions. We need to take these skills we’ve been honing and develop them intentionally to prepare us for what our field may look like during and after this global pandemic.  We must stay adaptive during times of constant change.

In particular, this requires us to be flexible in how we engage in research. For many of us this is new, so please take what you need and leave the rest. Engaging in research now may look like (1) meeting via online video conferencing platforms such as Zoom, Google Meet, etc; (2) providing more structure to your traditional in-person research meetings that you hadn’t initially planned; (3) creating agendas in advance for research meetings; (4) sending recap emails overviewing what was discussed in your research meetings; (5) having students, and yourself, creating research logs to document daily research activity; and (6) having students present poster or oral presentations via online platforms. 

In addition to transitioning your personal research program to one that can function remotely, as a discipline we also need to think about how to virtual move conferences. We have been amazed by how quickly conferences, such as the Special Session on commutative algebra at the Spring 2020 AMS sectional and the Western Algebraic Geometry Symposium (WAGS), have pivoted to online virtual conferencing.  In addition, both American University’s  Summer Program in Research and Learning (SPIRAL) and Purdue University’s  Undergraduate Research Conference will be held virtually, to continue to provide students with valuable opportunities to perform and present their research. New modalities are also emerging. For example, David Eisenbud is starting a weekly national virtual seminar for commutative algebra, using Zoom, hosted at MSRI. Find new ways to contribute and participate in your field during this time of upheaval. In, Ten Simple Rules for Organizing a Virtual Conference-Anywhere, Gichora et al provide great tips for planning and organizing a virtual conference. 

With this blog post, we have tried to provide a number of resources and tips during this transition. But we recognize there is no complete guide book on what to do as we scramble to gain our footing in our new circumstances. All we can say is simply do what works best for you and, when able, take time to plan and adjust to our possible futures. Since our primary focus at the moment should be our mental and physical health, we hope you’ll check out next month’s blog post on Mental Health Within the Black Mathematical Community. 

Dr. Haydee Lindo is an assistant professor of mathematics at Williams College. She is originally from Jamaica and received her Ph.D. from the University of Utah. Dr. Lindo is a commutative algebraist with research interests in homological algebra and representation theory.

Dr. Anisah Nu’Man is an assistant professor of mathematics at Spelman College. Originally, from Atlanta, GA Dr. Nu’Man obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research interests lie in geometric group theory.