Zoomsday

Zoomsday

When I was preparing to move out here to San Diego, I wondered a lot about what I would be doing to fill my days. I was technically coming out here with a job, but it was a deferred salary job that may or may not have lasted very long. I had been retained by one client for expert witness services through the team with which I had enlisted, but had no idea whether they would be my only client and case or if there would be others following it. I had stopped teaching at Cornell in 2017 after ten years. I was entitled by age and years of service to retire and get my post-retiree medical benefits. The truth was that the benefits were not an inducement to stop teaching, but ten years is a long time to make a weekly 230 mile drive and ten years is a long time to do anything. I’ve had a three year hiatus from teaching and I thought it would be interesting to see if any of the graduate business schools out here would have an interest in having me teach for them. Forty-four years of Wall Street experience and ten years of Ivy League teaching as a Clinical Professor should qualify me to be of interest to one school or other I figured. It did and I was asked to teach a trial course this Fall.

I was gathering possibilities. In this transition there were many possibilities and directions things could go, so I wanted to keep all the options open. Writing and teaching are always interesting options to me. They help validate me and fulfill me, Everyone wants to feel productive and I certainly like feeling that I have something of value to give students. So I agreed to teach a course in Project Finance, which was one of the four courses I had taught at Cornell. That was seven months ago, but time flies and the dates for my course are upon me. I made sure to use August to prepare my course materials (slimming down 700 slides to about 400 and updating them as needed), so I am prepared. What has changed is that COVID has made this a virtual class. We went back and forth on that as the University struggled with the same decision every other school did. The decision made, I needed to figure out the virtual lecture platform, which was, not surprisingly, Zoom. Even though Zoom was founded n 2011 and launched its product in 2013, I’m not sure I had heard much about it before 2018. But now everything has changed.

The two closest competitors to Zoom are Skype, which I never liked for some reason (though I do think I have an account) and Google’s Meet, which I think I’ve used once. On the other hand, Zoom is all over the place. Even though Zoom has a free account option, as you can imagine, there is also a premium service that is very reasonably priced but also more robust and does not limit call time like the free option. I have one of those for my venture company and we use it every week several times to keep in touch as a working group for the six of us who try to run the company. I’m sure someone can argue that we do not need visual capability to get and keep coordinated, but it does seem to help and does a better job of keeping us connected.

In addition, I need to use Zoom in my expert witness work. My partners (located in Palermo and Lisbon) and I communicate via What’s App and don’t bother with the video aspect. We talk almost every day. But I have now done one deposition and two arbitration testimonies via Zoom. It is the vehicle of choice apparently from the American Arbitration Association. Getting hammered at by a young litigation associate in New York (from the firm that represented me in the New York Wheel for six years, strangely enough) and being teamed with a defence attorney in Kansas City has time zone displacement issues, but you get used to it. I find I am getting good at looking serious yet pleasant on Zoom, such that I make a good impression with the arbitration panel. So far I have gotten good marks from my client, who in this case is the claimant’s law firms.

And now there is my course teaching at the University of San Diego that has its own master Zoom account for which I have a personalize access account on which to hold my classes. Holding Zoom meetings is one kind of hard to do thing, but teaching a course on Zoom is a whole other world of refinement and technique. To begin with, my classes are compressed into fewer sessions and are on Friday night for four hours and Saturday morning for another four hours. We do this two weekends in a row and I am now half way through having done my eight hours over the last two days. It went well, but it did so because I took the time to learn enough about the technology and how to use it for application to make sure it went well. I figured that these poor students are already suffering the disadvantages of life during COVID and all the challenges that brings to getting your money’s worth of education for your tuition. The least I could do is not be a bumbling Zoom idiot.

The way I teach is via PowerPoint slides that are animated for emphasis. That was fairly timely in 2007 when I began, but even by 2017 there were newer methods used by others. I had little or no interest in giving up my PowerPoint and I still felt it was an effective medium. What I had to do was to make sure I could synchronize Zoom and PowerPoint in the Slide Show mode to capture the animation. This turned out to be pretty easy and the only thing I could not figure out how to do was mute everyone (someone had a barking dog and a slamming screen door to quiet). I had to keep my wits about me, but it all worked and I was able to record the sessions as well for the students who missed the class. Yes, some students cut Zoom classes too.

If you start from the understanding that teaching a four hour class, even with a fifteen minute break in the middle, it a tough thing to do, you will understand that doing a Zoom lecture for that time is far less physically demanding than being physically in the classroom. I remember when I started teaching Kim would pick me up after my 2:45 classes at Cornell and I had to let her drive until I got my wits about me again. It was quite draining. But not only am I more practiced at teaching for long stretches, I am more familiar with the material and I find doing it in the comfort of my own home makes it a lot easier. I cannot swear whether it is as impactful on a virtual basis as an in-person class, but I guess the course evaluations will tell the tale on that next weekend. There are so many variables in the equation (especially the different types of students I teach here versus what I taught at Cornell).

I read online that Zoom is having all sorts of problems in various countries including the U.S. especially over privacy and security. They will likely solve that problem because you cannot buy the momentum they have with the global business and academic communities. Their competitive position is off to a great start versus their older and newer competitors. They hit the market just right at just the right moment. Now every day seems to be Zoomsday.