What Happened? The EdTech Pandemic Podcast

I want to get this out of my head and on to the blog because I had this idea while in conversation with Reclaim’s Pilot Irwin and Occidental College’s Jacob Alden Sargent yesterday, and after sitting on it for more than 12 hours I think it could be interesting. The idea is pretty simple: channel my best Terry Greene and talk to folks about their edtech pandemic stories, and the subsequent fallout. This is a topic that came up again and again while traveling with Brian in February, and it’s no secret the sector was hit particularly hard, and seems many are still shell-shocked professionally (not to mention the broader personal toll). This was already one of the themes I planned on writing about from the road trip given there was a tentative sense of trying to move on.

And yesterday while talking with Pilot and Jacob, the impact COVID had on Jacob’s edtech group came up once again and the stories are powerful and important. Sounds very much to me like folks are still trying to make sense of what happened. So, in that spirit, I would be interested in just talking to people about the the impact of COVID on their edtech affiliated group(s). How did it play out? What was the aftermath?

In other words, “Jim Groom, what happened?” said in my best Dr. Oblivion voice. I understand folks may want to avoid this topic like the plague (pun intended). I also understand this may be a terrible idea. What’s more, someone may already be doing it, or want to do it, and in that case go for it. But if not, and folks are interested, I would love to have some conversations with any interested parties about their edtech group’s institutional story during COVID, as well as get a sense of where they are now. Maybe I’ll have a couple of folks interested from OER23, and I would love to put together a bit of an archive to capture these stories before they get lost in oblivion.