In the leadup to the commencement of semester, most of my time was spent setting up teaching materials in Canvas, the new QUT learning management system. This was frustrating, as there was quite a steep learning curve in getting to know the new system, and I really hadn’t created a plan at the start which might help guide me through the process. I attended workshops that the university ran for staff, but mostly I found them to be focused on the new interface, which didn’t really address my main problem: how to transform my materials into a format compatible with the new faculty Canvas template. A considerable amount of time was spent trying to get a handle on the huge amount of content that was copied from blackboard. To help staff, this copy of previous content was done automatically, and while this probably helped with units that were mostly powerpoint slides and lecture and tutorial materials, this was not helpful for me as much of my content resided in Jupyter notebooks. At the time, I did not realise that I was focusing on structural issues rather than on the main unit content. This is something that I can change for the same process next semester. I should be able to make this process easier by separating the content from the structural form of the unit, and plan sub-tasks for both. I intend to try this for next semester.

Another significant frustration was the need to adapt my previous assessment to fit nicely with the Canvas way of doing things. I wasn’t expecting to have to change my assessment at all, but in the end, I made quite a few changes to help the assessment fit into the new style. This was time consuming and annoying at the time, but ultimately I’m glad that I commited to doing it rather that putting it off. A downside of this is that the changes meant that quite a lot of previous video material was now subtly different, and really needed re-recording during the unit – something that I was hoping to avoid. This cascade of changes nearly drove me crazy in the early part of the unit, but now that I’m aware of it, I can plan to minimise it next semester. I also plan to do this by focusing on unifying the main aspects of the unit and drawing heavily on what I have done this semester. Keeping the consistency not only makes it easy for me in making the changes, it should also make the units easier for tutors and also for students – particularly those moving from undergrad to post grad.

Despite being a very frustrating period, I can certainly treat these challenges as learning experiences. This won’t be the last time that significant change is forced upon me, so I need to take advantage of what I have learnt in future. In particular, it will probably help to spend time at the beginning of a challenge to identify the difference between structural and content tasks, and plan processes for dealing with both effectively.