I’m used to seeing myself as quite a digitally literate person. This is partly due to me having been the youngest one in quite many contexts in my life: in my childhood family, and when studying in university as well as among my colleagues in the beginning of my teaching career. I was playing with commodore 64 at the age of three and got to teach all the courses that had something to do with computers when I first started teaching after graduating. Technical issues have always been relatively easy for me and even there is more to digital literacy than that as described in article Developing digital literacies (2014), it helps. In this article, digital literacy is described as “a set of academic and professional situated practices supported by diverse and changing technologies.”

This was something that I thought I mastered, but when the covid-19 lockdown hit Finland and Aalto University on March 2020, I realized this was not the case anymore. I had never used Zoom. I had had two Skype meetings in 2018, and I had felt slightly akward in both of them. Neither had I ever recorder my lectures and I used maybe 5 % of the features offered by MyCourses, the course platform used in Aalto – even I proudly believed that I was known among students as a teacher who anyway was using it.

For the first two weeks of lockdown I felt quite miserable about this. I learned some new features in MyCourses and attended Teams-meatings, but not much more. I would never feel comfortable talking via Zoom. Half of each lecture would be spent with technical issues and internet crashing. My 2-year old son would learn to watch cartoons for 8 hours a day and would never learn to play outdoors again. My dear son was actually the main reason I was so stressed – I was alone with him at the beginning of the lockdown and could not properly concentrate on my work (but I did learn to change nappies in Teams-meatings without no one noticing). However, when his dad started to take care of him during daytime and I could concentrate on my work, I noticed there was really nothing to worry about.

Giving the lecture from home was no different from University – it was nice to drink my own coffee and wear woolen socks all day but talking to students felt just the same. There was less technical problems than in class rooms with screens, white boards and copy machines. Personal tutoring and study plan discussions went fine in Zoom. However, some challenges remained: I teach quite a lot in it-class, and I’m used to walking around the class and checking if students have understood everything I tried to teach, helping them if needed. I wasn’t first sure how to mimic this interaction online. Asking every to share their screen with me repeatedly felt too heavy a system. But then asking them to just ask if they had questions didn’t work either, as everybody would not ask. Well, now I think I will just ask each student to share their screen in the end of the class as a compromise and hope that will work. Another question remaining is the sensorial one – in most of my classes feel and hand of a fabric are essential both when showing examples and when commenting and assessing students work, and this information is quite impossible to share online. This question remains still unanswered.

Digital literacy is about much more than mastering online interaction, but during 2020 this has been the most essential question in working life. In the article Developing digital literacies (2014), digital literacies are divided in seven elements. My online teaching experiences fall in three of them: Digital scholarship, Learning skills and ICT Literacy. Information- and Media literacy, Communication and collaboration as well as Career and identity management could be next challenges to tackle.