Title: The Masked Professor
Audience: Lycoming College faculty
Date: Fall 2020
Software Utilized for the Project: Audacity, Podbean, and Zoom
About the Project: Lycoming College was a rare institution of education that returned to entirely in-person instruction in the fall of 2020. While it was fully in-person, it didn’t feel like any instruction we had ever deployed before with social distancing and masks. We were reminded of how contextual all instruction is.
It was a time of high stress and anxiety and low interpersonal connection. Despite the historically strong sense of community among the faculty at Lycoming, at this time there weren’t many forums to share successes and challenges. I was looking for ways to positively impact the faculty community and came up with the idea of a podcast called The Masked Professor.
The podcast had two different kinds of episodes, interviews with professors and presentations on relevant topics related to mental wellness during COVID. I’m grateful for the things I learned in the research episodes, but I definitely found the interview episodes were much more engaging and I am sure more interesting to faculty. The interviews used three open-ended questions as their structure:
- What are the challenges of teaching during COVID
- What is going well?
- What question do you have for others?
I announced the podcast two or three times on the faculty listserv and posted new episodes on my personal Facebook account as I am friends with so many members of the target audience. In hindsight, I should have marketed it more, but admittedly many people did not have the mental bandwidth to listen to this that semester.
The podcast lasted from August 2020 until January 2021 when my workload became too much to continue it.
Here are some sample episodes:
- Interview with Professor Andrew Stafford (French)
- Interview with Professor Jeremy Ramsey (Chemistry)
- Interview with Professor Chris Hill (Theatre)