I’m teaching again after 20 years away. The tech is pure absurdity

IT IS never a good feeling to open a new piece of software and realise that something terrible has happened. The kind of terrible that results in dozens of instructional videos, hundreds of entries in the FAQs and multiple, contradictory warnings from people online purporting to give “simple introductions” to the software in question.

All of this and more happened to me when I found myself subjected to a learning management system (known not-so-fondly as an LMS) for teaching university classes in media studies. In a year when the US higher education system is imploding (more on that later), my…