A rapping professor. A cat in class. Pornography on Zoom. How online classes work at colleges during coronavirus – USA Today
Mark Naison, 73, had just days to move online his decades-old class, a history of music from rock ’n’ roll to hip-hop. He wasn’t sure how to preserve the raucous spirit of the course, but he had an answer that had worked for him in the past.
“I can make a fool of myself,” he said.
The technology, mainly the video-streaming software Zoom, was unfamiliar to him. Without a physical presence in the classroom, the professor at Fordham University wondered how he would keep his students’ attention. He wasn’t sure how to use the music videos he had played live in class. He knew it was important to keep students’ spirits up as they struggled to adjust from in-person courses on a campus of friends to the isolation of distance learning.
So he filmed himself rapping. His material included odes to social distancing, hand-washing and self-quarantining.
He is not the fastest rapper, but his rhymes mostly work. And his students seem to appreciate the lengths he is willing to get a laugh.