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‘It’s a Doozy’

Rappaport visiting professor Jane Swift has run a state and led an educational tech company, but teaching online during the pandemic is a new world altogether.

       
Photo/Reba Saldanha Former Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift, the Jerome Lyle Rappaport visiting professor at Boston College Law, addresses the community January 15, 2020  Photograph by Reba Saldanha

When former Massachusetts Governor and longtime education technology executive Jane Swift joined BC Law as this semester’s Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy Distinguished Visiting Professor, she was excited about all the personal interaction she would have with members of the Law School community.

Just over two months into her busy speaking schedule and seminar, however, everything changed. Coronavirus struck. School shut down. Classes migrated online.

Everyone is experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic in his or her own way. In her Impact blog post, Swift not only confesses to her efforts to catch up with the kind of technology she has spent years helping to build and market, she also defines what “online learning” truly means, which is not what what most everyone is practicing right now.

Amid talk of embarrassments like botching her first Zoom video, Swift celebrates the humor, teamwork, and learning opportunities that are emerging and shaping a new academic reality at BC Law and beyond.

“It’s a doozy,” she says of the experience.

Read more on her Impact blog post.

Photo: Swift giving her inaugural lecture at BC Law in January to a classroom packed with students, a far different setting from the remote one she finds herself in now.