Happy August folks! This month we’re all gearing up for a fall semester like no other, and we have a month of articles, courses, podcast episodes, and videos to help you traverse this new terrain.
As simultaneously the end of summer and the beginning of the back-to-school season, August is all about transitions. This year brings larger transitions than normal, however, as we all navigate school closings, unsustainable childcare situations, and financial and health uncertainty. One of our primary mottos at Ideas on Fire is that you’re a body in the world, not just a brain on a stick. So this month’s content situates your publishing, teaching, and career practices within the new contexts we’re now living in.
Online teaching and accessibility
After taking a much-needed July break, the Imagine Otherwise podcast team is back with awesome August episodes about taking your courses online during a pandemic and how online teaching can be made more accessible to faculty and students with varied bodyminds and life circumstances.
Host Cathy Hannabach and guests discuss making course content that students can access from diverse devices and home situations, building assignments that support rather than deny disabilities, what happens to work/life balance in quarantine, the politics and practicalities of childcare, the financial costs of working from home, and building accessibility into your online courses so it’s there by design rather than exception.
Professional training for diverse careers
Also coming this month is the much anticipated revamped version of our popular course Introduction to Professional Academic Editing.
A lot has changed in the academic editing industry and the broader world since we first created this course in 2017, so we spent the summer reworking it to even better prepare folks for a fantastic academic editing career.
The new version addresses how COVID-19 has affected academic publishing, the shift to online events and training, new editing tools, and academics transitioning into editorial careers. It also has extensive core material on developmental editing, copyediting, working with authors, prepping files, the politics of grammar, editorial professional development, scholarly training and communities, and peer review.
Taking research public while social distancing
At the end of spring semester, we released two new online courses to help you sharpen your digital skills and adapt your career to this new moment, and we’re excited to see so many folks working their way through them.
How to Start an Academic Podcast teaches you how to go from a great idea to published show. As a multimedia form uniquely suited to our pandemic moment, academic podcasting is a great way to broaden your research’s accessibility, enliven public conversations, and help reshape what higher education means today.
Public Engagement and Impact helps you share your research and build community to make concrete change beyond the academy, including how to reach diverse audiences online. Whether you’re brand-new to taking your work public or a seasoned public intellectual looking to broaden your reach, this course can help you develop public engagement strategies that fit your resources and goals.
All of our online courses are now open for enrollment and we’d love to see you there!
Looking forward to a great month!
Throughout this month we’ll be sharing this new content along with the best from our archives to help you set yourself up for a great fall semester while also enjoying the last month of summer.
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