A friend had remarked on FB, something to the effect of, “how are schools able to support online classes after two-days’ work, but had to close schools for snow?” Or something of that nature. He’s removed the post, while I was cobbling together a response, that goes something like this:

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Maybe because this whole “online learning” thing is too new. We’ve only [he was a past co-worker with Pearson] been doing it for a short while now (nearly 20 years, now I think about it).

Things move painfully slow in Brick & Mortar education and business because, no doubt, there isn’t enough interest, or demand, or understanding to do so meaningfully.

It’s an unknown concept to many, and the unknown is scary to many people.

I expect that there will be a huge number of people that struggle briefly to deal with the tech-demands for live, real-time video & audio. There will be some that show up in their underwear and forget to turn off the camera. There will be some that forget how to mute their audio, or are oblivious to their own siblings or children — or their own chirping Smoke Detectors.

Also, if we think about the previous weather-related situations, school closures were only one or two days, maybe. Now, this new crisis is looking like it’ll be a few weeks to even few months.

They’re scrambling to react. That’s a good thing.

Also, we’ve an opportunity to do as much as we can to help, support, and educate the educators. After all, for telecommuters, this is all rather old hat to us.

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Yeah, I do get a bit wordy on Book of Face every now and again.