Teaching audio through a pandemic
Exploring the Audio Engineering Technology Faculty Teaching Experience During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Doctoral dissertation, Tennessee State University, 2022.
The question
Audio engineering is taught by putting people in front of equipment. In March 2020 the equipment stayed in the building and the students went home, and every faculty member teaching the subject had to invent a replacement in about a week.
The research asked what they actually did. Not what the institutional guidance said, not what the post-hoc reports claimed — what the people teaching a hands-on technical subject genuinely fell back on when the hands-on part was removed, and what it cost them.
Why it was worth writing down
Because the honest answer to “how did that go” was disappearing fast. Institutions had strong incentives to record the period as a success, and individual faculty had no particular incentive to say otherwise in public. Meanwhile the practical knowledge — which substitutions worked, which ones quietly failed, what a student loses when the room goes away — was sitting in the heads of people who were extremely keen to stop thinking about it.
I was one of them. I taught GRAMMY Camp through a laptop in those years, from a control room, to a grid of faces. Running that class is not the same job, and pretending otherwise would have made the research worthless.
Where it went next
I presented a paper drawn from this work at the MEIEA Summit in Las Vegas in March 2023, alongside a roundtable called The Computers Took Over at Midnight. The through-line from it to the current work on generative AI in the classroom is direct: both are questions about what a technology actually does to teaching, asked by looking at what teachers do rather than at what the technology promises.
Related
GRAMMY Camp is where the online teaching happened. Speaking has the MEIEA papers.