A mini-dump for now

The past days were hell. I was exposed to a lot of stimuli: indifference, hate, frustration, humor, Chinese typing, equipment handling, app wrangling, etc. It can be overloading. Last night, I dumped all of the thoughts and gunk in my head into an anonymous post in this blog. I will release this soon. The gunk in my head was worth 2500 words or so. It felt great to dump all of this gunk that I was able to lie down and relax. I will publish this post soon.

I do not think telling people “辛苦了” is good. I always respond, “不是辛苦，是痛苦!”. I would rather that we really expend the effort, be frustrated, and help each other find a way to make it less 辛苦 in the first place. Perhaps the first step is to really sit down, prepare in advance, and really listen to each other and do something about it. We have to spend time getting to know each other, just like any relationship.

I really envy people who can really be indifferent. I do not know whether they are also indifferent in other aspects of their lives, perhaps they care a lot but not in the things I care about. That is ok. But I wish they could announce it explicitly and not use implicit signals — it helps to resolve uncertainty and lessens the time spent on a collective task. If you, dear reader, are like the person I described, try pining for someone who is indifferent to you. On the other hand, I will imagine being pined by someone who is eager.

My stream-of-consciousness recollection of last spring semester

During the spring semester 2020, I had to teach a class of only international students roughly spanning three different major time zones, GMT-5, GMT, GMT+8. I was aware of this even before the university started announced that classes will be fully online. Furthermore, I actually know by name/face the students who are going to attend classes. I also know where they are now. I would rank this as the biggest benefit: early awareness.

During the winter break when the outbreak started gaining momentum, I was already looking into how to make videos, thinking about how to adjust accordingly, and specifying what exactly I want to happen. I believe this is another benefit: imagining what you want to have and being explicit about them if you were in the position of the student.

In the end, I felt alone since I was in the most unique situation of having only international master and PhD students in the class at that time (correct me here if I am wrong, now I remember that there were four other instructors teaching a smaller batch of students). I did not ask for help until really needed. For example, I think I became aware around mid April 2020 that Zoom will no longer be free in China (for personal accounts). Glad that I had a backup, but it has bumps here and there. I even created a Linode server with Jitsi installed but the server was extremely slow and I do not think the school/university would have reimbursed me. Was this a good assumption? Perhaps. I would have to expend energy to just convince someone that what I am asking for is appropriate and necessary. And I do not want to do this anymore. I stopped a few months after I started this job. I sometimes still ask but it is much more sparingly now. It rose to the extent that I just pay for things myself, much to the surprise of my colleagues.

That was the time I asked for help from the school technician to request a “corporate” account. I was granted permanent links to the scheduled time slots instead. This was helpful but I can only speculate why a “corporate” account could not be granted. For all the talk about convenience, there surely are layers of getting convenience.

What I want my colleagues to know

• The apps we use by default in China do not necessarily function very well outside of China, especially for foreigners. For example, I cannot scan AliPay QR codes in HK to pay a store. So fucking embarrassing. This might have changed from that time. I do not know and do not want to know anymore.
• The apps we use by default in China are cognitively demanding. It takes time to figure out. I would argue that foreigners and the local old Chinese people (who have to use cellphones for the first time) are remarkably similar. Therefore, the true strategy is to enable international students to use the apps without condescension. Of course, English customer service is always a good thing to use too. So far, I have enjoyed the English customer service of AliPay and DingTalk.
• That in my admin style I will not make you feel alone the way I felt alone when I was doing the online class last spring 2020.
• That I even use the Chinese language to communicate and reach out for work-related stuff (I admit sometimes begrudgingly because I do not know all the words/usages/nuances of the language and I have to rehearse what I say). I also type Chinese in pinyin rather than relying on translation, so it is really cognitively demanding. I do not enjoy it unless the topic is actually fun. I do not think my Chinese language skills are at the level of an elementary graduate. Sure, I might pass a test but that does not directly translate to ability. I keep my spirits up through good humor instead. But I admit this has its limits.
• That I assume the worst because I cannot get cooperation (what people call 协调 and 配合) in even the most basic of things: to be able to go back to my family with the certainty of being able to come back to the university for work. That is why my blog name is called Living in Exile. Of course, I am being “compensated” for it and I am grateful for it, but “compensation” has its limits.
• What worked for you when you were younger does not necessarily mean that it will work now. Furthermore, the conditions you were subjected to need not be the conditions you subject a future generation of students.
• Fairness, whatever it may mean, is in the eye of the beholder.
• Finally, when you are in a class with both domestic and international students and a domestic student asks a question in Chinese, please translate the question to English and give an answer in English. It feels bad to be excluded.

What I wanted and did not want for myself and my students:

• I should respect time zones of everyone to the greatest extent possible.
• I should be mindful of internet access (not everyone has good internet access!!).
• I should divide my desktop screen into two parts: one part that contains slides and one part that simulates or emulates a “whiteboard”.
• I should have an independent writing tablet so that I can write better on the “whiteboard”.
• I wanted a recording that takes in my microphone input (and at times computer audio output) and my split screen.
• I did not want students to install any other software like DingTalk, QQ on top of WeChat.
• I also wanted to separate the personal from the professional. The only thing I asked the students to use is a dedicated place for discussion that is intuitive to use. I wanted them to use Slack (here it is unavoidable to register for an account).
• I did not want to check attendance because circumstances are different. I also did not want to check attendance on behalf of someone who has more economies of scale in doing so.
• I strongly wanted a change from the typical exam assessment style.
• I did not want to be micro-managed and be monitored.

Apps like WeChat, QQ, DingTalk take so much disk space without telling you. I am also wary of where the “recordings” go to be honest. My collective WeChat data since starting my job here is 2.8GB in size!!! WTF? Whose convenience is being served? WeChat simply cannot function as a discussion board even with its newer Quote function (Fun fact: I have not updated my WeChat since last year!!),. My colleagues sometimes could not be bothered to read the messages — how can you expect our students to do the same??? Slack is relatively better and has a concept of discussion threads so that similar topics can be aggregated and traced to a unqiue source. I did not use Piazza at that time because when I used it in China last spring 2017 and 2018, it choked now and then (it has some Google-related components when loading).

To be fair to WeChat, I am grateful for its Search Chat History function. I believe every student should learn this function early, based on my experience with new international students. This allows you to filter files, photos and videos, even chat sources (who sent the messages), and more. This is perhaps the most useful function of the app and why a big data file sits within your phone (and likely somewhere else — this feels like distributed storage).

For the assessment, I was willing to grade over the entire semester. This means that deadlines are almost non-existent, but I provide milestones so that students know at what point some things have to be more or less available but strict submission deadline is not enforced. “Submit at your own time within the semester” would be the best description. It created a lot of work for me but then I wanted my students to feel that they are really taken care of, although they may protest to the level of care I give. I was also willing to just have one exam component and the rest are projects. We still have not had the conversation about the exam proctoring and how to handle exam assessment on a bigger scale.

What I had and what price I was willing to pay

• The drive to figure out things for myself without asking for help: understanding in my own terms
• The university learning management system (one of the few bright moments in the whole experience, though with heartache)
• An HP-Spectre x360 laptop that can be turned into a tablet for writing (not very useful in Linux but useful in Windows)
• An extra 17” monitor that has an EasyRead feature so that it is all in black and white
• A Zoom account, awareness of Jitsi (think of this as a burner phone but for videos, no account registration and all that bullshit AND you can join their community call!), 8x8 account (the corporate side of Jitsi; now 8x8 requires paying)
• My own paid end-to-end encrypted file sharing service (no need to download or register for those given a file link!). I had a layer of backup to guard against things that could go wrong and it did. Some of my students were unable to access the video archive at the university learning management system. This file sharing service did not ask students to register an account!
• When I learned from the news of Zoom's data handling practices, I also installed Obs Studio (had to learn it by trial and error myself; I call this software LaTeX but for videos) and Handbrake (for processing a large high quality file into something manageable and uploadable to our learning management) and completely avoided the recording feature of Zoom.

Zoom recordings are compressed. A better option is to keep two versions: an uncompressed version (for future re-use in a course) and a compressed version (for on-demand viewing). I had a 1.5 hour class before and the uncompressed version reached 11 GB at least based on my settings for Obs Studio (again, not professionally trained!). The compressed version becomes about 250 MB or so after going through Handbrake. I frequently ran out of disk space.

What I did not have

• Some technical niceties: Microsoft Surface, Apple products, green screen, good camera (only used built-in laptop camera, but did not need it in the end)
• A big picture with small details briefing from the top management in my working/professional language
• Better internet access (would have wanted to have all cameras turned on)
• A written document in English, whether crowdsourced or top-down, containing best practices (We only have scattered and untimely information here and there. Dan Levy's Teaching Effectively with Zoom and Gary King's How and Why Do You Make These Videos?)

Other things in the last semester

Since there were no physical seminars for international (and domestic) students during the pandemic, I had to improvise. Thankfully, I have planned for this last 2019 already. One extremely difficult aspect of the seminars is not the seminar but the seat reservation and attendance checking. I will not bore you with the details of the seat reservation and the need for attendance checking. But the key thing is that reserving a seat is different from getting a seat and there is an algorithm that decides which student gets the privilege of a seat.

I would like to believe that our international students have tried and was frustrated by the system. I also believe that some of these students are not trying hard enough. Regardless of the case, I could not blame them. Some of my colleagues think that I am too pro-student but this is not true. You only need to see how many international students I have failed repeatedly in courses to know that I mean business.

So I pitched the “webinar” concept. The “webinar” is really me downloading a publicly available video and then streaming this video over Zoom (Activate share computer sound/output in Zoom!!!!!). The whole process is absurd but I have to conform with the regulations. The “webinar” allows me to deal with the seminar reservation problem, allows students to finish the seminars as early as possible, and I can ensure that the seminars are in English (you will be surprised how much Chinese language seminars our international students sit through to pass away the time).

Despite the absurdity I described, I think that by selecting “webinars” for viewing, I was able to somewhat catch up on some interesting topics myself and I had to watch more to filter and adjust the level accordingly. I believe some of my colleagues invite speakers that have topics which would benefit an extremely restricted set of audiences. By increasing the number of “webinars”, there is more diversity in the topics. This took a lot of my time too. I must admit this is difficult to scale to domestic students. But sitting down to talk about it is the first step.

Concluding remarks

I reached roughly 2500 words again. You may argue that I have been projecting my own problems and then thinking these are also the problems of international students. YOU ARE WRONG. If you were involved, you will question the assumptions you make.

My headache/neckache is somewhat subsiding now. Earlier reading: Blood pressure 151/104, 97 beats per minute. Reading after some editing: Blood pressure 152/118, 93 beats per minute. Will talk more about these in another post.

#OnlineClasses #Personal #TeachingDuringCOVID #Rants