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I sympathise. I'm a lecturer, and it's awful for us too. We increasingly don't get a choice how we upload our lectures. My university forces us to do it all via Teams. We aren't allowed to host our own sites and make our slides and notes available for all. It is incredibly short sighted and drives me mad; but we have been *told*.

Even when you do try and lecture... its just a wall of camera off webcams and you have no idea if you're even connected to the students or they're listening or if they've switched off. At least in the old days you could see if everyones eyes were on their laptops instead of the talk. Now it's just ... awful.

Share the tools you write! I've never met a lecturer who didn't enjoy circumventing stupid bureaucratic rules... and if we can help share tools with our students to help them get the material in a way that works for them that's a win for us. We think our subjects are cool... we want to share our love for them with you... anything that helps us do it is a win!

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~pseudoriemann wrote:

I really do feel the pain of my lecturers when they feel like they are talking into the void... I tried my best to give signs of life when I could but it could never replace being in the same room. Thank you for your efforts to teach even in such difficult circumstances!

While I do not like Teams at all, I do see some value in a unified platform for lectures. At my university every class is taught differently and one can quickly lose the overview of where to find what. But it should be an open source platform that supports all modes of teaching, and with no restrictions to where else material is provided. I am curious, do these rules come from the heads of the universities or from politicians?

I would share my code if it weren't extremely hacky and had applications in more than one place! I think the recommendation to add audio commentary to Powerpoint slides came from above too, but it was only actually done like that in one class. There were also many manual steps involved, so I think just sharing the results benefited everyone the most.