Organizing teaching resources

[liv]

So the first online course of our giant international Covid training project is live: behold The power of genomics to understand the Covid-19 pandemic.

I'm mainly linking to show off, but you're welcome to join if you'd like. It's pitched at a scientific audience but if you have high school biology and some general curiosity you'll probably make sense of most of it. Totally free of cost and it doesn't matter if you poke at it but don't complete it.

Getting it over the line has been a massive enterprise; basically it's involved three months of shifting our entire way of working from a local thing mostly run by me and senior minion, to this incredibly complex collaboration with the COG consortium, already a huge mega-group across many different institutions. Plus we are desperately trying to decolonize! all! the! things! and work on an equal level with experts from all over the world, even though most of the UK team are used to a Eurocentric model of training.

I mean one of the reasons it's slightly delayed is that Omicron hit in the middle of the development process. The African-led group who first identified the variant got extremely angry with the rich countries that punished their disclosure instead of helping them with the crisis. Which was entirely justified but we got somewhat caught in the backlash and a bunch of previously enthusiastic African collaborators decided they didn't trust Europeans at all any more. We are honestly trying not to be parasitic White Saviours, but it's a learning curve and it's basically fair that we've run out of benefit of the doubt and second chances with some people.

Anyway, work discussions and planning have reminded me that in my personal life, I've spent the pandemic years creating and accumulating a huge pile of teaching resources, while I'm teaching on Zoom and don't have access to books, or the books available aren't suitable for what I'm trying to achieve. But it's all a big mess just dumped into a directory on my computer.

I know I have information management people among my circle. Would you be willing to give me some hints for organizing all my electronic teaching materials? I feel like I should know this kind of thing based on my professional experience, but actually... I've either been in large institutions and relied on infrastructure and expert support, or I've been in backwaters who never really had an IM strategy and just got away with things being in a bit of a muddle because the scale was small enough that it never got unmanageable.

What I need is some kind of sensible plan for my personal materials, so I can find them again and adapt and reuse them. I am willing to spend some money but not five figure sums on subscribing to a service meant for institutions, not individuals. It needs to be something fairly easy to use; if even starting to tag and store things becomes a massive faff I'll end up just not doing it. I would strongly prefer something where the architecture is on my own computer and not in the cloud. I don't have a massive amount of stuff in terms of file size, just a very large number of mostly text files. Backups would be good but that's not the main part of the problem I'm trying to solve.

And-a-pony level would be something that can easily manage a mix of English language and Hebrew language materials, but I can probably catalogue things in English and use transliteration as appropriate.

Comments

[cesy]

It may be worth talking to alexwlchan about tagging personal documents.