I was delighted to see this reference in Boing Boing to a viral Twitter thread (here archived with comments) from a student horrified to discover that the subject he was taking remotely at a Canadian university was actually being taught by a professor who died in 2019. During an entire program in which all of the courses at the university were being taught online due to the pandemic, students had been following video classes that the professor recorded at the time, and had been evaluated by a teaching assistant, who was not exactly a medium capable of communicating with the professor from the afterlife, but instead continued to use his evaluation criteria.
The student discovered the situation when he tried to locate the professor’s email on the university’s website through a search, and found his obituary instead. Beyond the black humor of thinking about we professors who won’t shut up even after death, the incident highlights much of what is wrong with university education: it is possible for an institution to offer an online course in the form of a set of videos and interaction carried out only by a teaching assistant, with class sessions lacking any real interactivity.
While the story raised a smile, I have to say that a similar situation could never happen at the university where I have been working for thirty years, which I am very grateful for. In the first…
