My academic work is nominally divided into research, teaching and admin stuff, with the first two categories taking up the majority of time and effort. One of the issues with teaching, as I personally see it, is the lack of continuity. Once a particular course is finished, it feels as if nothing tangible remains of the work that went into it. Of course, I do realize that the real impact of teaching is in the knowledge transmitted to the students and, hopefully, in the positive impact it will have on their lives. This is all fine, and it does indeed make teaching rewarding. Still, at the end of each term, it seems like I have just emptied a bucket of water into a sea – some work has been done, but the result is not visible.
In that sense, our rapid transition to online teaching in the face of spreading COVID-19 virus has had an unexpected positive effect – it prompted me to make short videos of historical tangents and anecdotes to accompany my otherwise dry lecture notes in fluid mechanics and energy conversion. I did it in response to feedback from my students, who wrote that these tangents indirectly helped them internalize the information and convert it to knowledge. During normal, face-to-face lectures, I would use the anecdotes to break up the monotony of the material. Once we moved to remote teaching, I found that planning, recording and editing the videos provided the motivation for myself to keep going with teaching.
Somehow, when a video is published, it is satisfying to know that it will have a life of its own in the inter-webs long after the course is finished, the exam is written, the marks are assigned and the material is largely forgotten by the students.
Here is an example of historical reference from the early days of computational fluid dynamics (CFD):
And here is a funny Greek metaphor for extracting work from mixture separation: