I don’t have much to say about my virtual desktop since so much of what I need to access isn’t instructor but rather program director related. However, I have learned that taking the time to get and stay organized is a HUGE time-saver in the long run. I’m not a naturally organized person, but the more files I accumulate, the more I realize that I need to be able to find them so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I spent some time over COVID reorganizing my desktop and making everything more accessible/easier to find.
I also find that organization and consistency are really important and helpful for our online students. They don’t always think and organize the same way we do, and what we think is clear may actually be really confusing. I think that the simpler we can keep our courses (with academic integrity and an appropriate level of rigor, of course), the better. The longer we teach a course, the more we tend to accumulate, and the more cluttered our course shells can easily become. This makes things more difficult for us (to keep up on broken links, for example) and for our students.
As a program director, I’m trying to make our EDU and ECE courses look as similar as possible without infringing on faculty’s sense of creativity and ownership. We’ve added the same course forge to most of our classes, and over the years created similar landing pages and navigation tools. We’ve gotten great feedback from students – they enjoy knowing what to expect, and they feel like they don’t have to waste time trying to figure out how to navigate the course at the beginning of each semester.
Staying organized in my personal life is another story….
Education & Early Childhood Education at YC 