Photo: Klaas Metselaar ‘I’m sitting in the attic, my office at home. All my books are here, which is quite a luxury really. I took some papers home to tidy up. And mostly I’m busy answering emails and skyping with thesis students. I’m not teaching at the moment; I will be next week. The course Design II in International Land and Water Management has just started. There is a lot of group work, which the students usually do on the sixth floor in the Forum, but they can’t do that now. Those groups are now working online in the virtual classrooms on Brightspace, supervised by two student assistants. We teachers can join in and answer question via the computer. It’s all one big crash course in working via the internet.
The experimenting is nice. It’s like a kind of Open University.
One of the problems is that the Wi-Fi in student houses is not great. It can cope with one person being online, but it causes problems if five students are following courses online in one house. But the experimenting is nice. It’s like a kind of Open University. Distance learning. What works, what doesn’t, how do the students like it? And what can we use once the crisis is over? It’s one big experiment. Do I get out of doors? Oh yes. I have a dog. I’d recommend that to anyone, a dog.’
This is the fourth part of a series on working from home during the corona crisis. The editorial staff calls a WUR colleague every day to find out how things are going. The illustration is (of course) a selfie or a snapshot taken by a housemate. Would you like to participate? Mail resource@wur.nl or share via #WURkfromHOME.