This is a difficult question to answer because it contains some hidden assumptions. There are actually three conditions we are considering: (1) Attending in person and living in a dorm or other student accommodation, (2) attending in person, but living with your parents in the same city as your university, and (3) attending remotely using only online learning systems.

If the condition (1) pertains, then you need to assure yourself that social distancing is possible in both residences and classes, that cafeterias, etc. are properly set up for this, etc. As well, you need to ascertain the mask policy, and other Covid-19-specific policies before you go. If things aren't right, don't go.

If condition (2) pertains, then you need to know about the policies regarding social distancing in classes and other public spaces as well as other Covid-19-specific policies. Cafeterias, etc. need not concern you as you can bring food from home. You will also have to be careful about not contaminating your home and putting your family at risk, so you might need to change your clothes and shower immediately on your return from class.

If condition (3) pertains, then you need to ensure that you have the technology you need to be successful (high-speed internet, possibly a second monitor–trust me–and anything else you might need.) A really good, ergonomic chair is also helpful, as you'll be spending a lot of time in it.

In all cases, you should, really, really should, spend some time learning about how to learn effectively online. I have taught university courses online, and know the common mistakes. One really bit one is waiting until the hour before class to try to do your work. Likewise, waiting until the end of term to do your work. Neither strategy is successful. A good book on this is Lessons from the Cyberspace Classroom (Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2001). Lessons from the Cyberspace Classroom. The realities of online teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.) Designed for professors, it's also a good guide for students.

Beyond what I've just said about learning online, it's difficult to give advice because so many courses are being rushed online by people who don't know the technology and have never taught online. There will be a lot of flailing about as they try to figure out what works and what doesn't. Some brick-and-mortar universities already have extensive online programs, so you might consider enrolling at one of those. Athabasca University in Canada is one I know of, but there are others. If you are going to learn online, it's best to learn from people who know how to do it.

There will be a lot of emotion surrounding this topic. So first, this has been discussed before, regarding school children, when microcomputers first came out. Then as now, the answer was, "It depends on what they're doing."

TV shows designed to do nothing more than sell toys to toddlers (I'm thinking of a canine-based show here,) should be avoided. Educational shows that don't market any toys (they exist) are not a problem.

Likewise, programs that allow children to (virtually) draw and paint are just modern equivalents to paper and crayons.

Before giving a blanket answer therefore, stop and think about what the kids will be doing with the technology, not what the technology is. Remember that kids have, in the past, eaten crayons and stabbed each other with coloured pencils. Technology is never entirely good or bad.

The best comment on this that I have seen is from Carl Bereiter: "We also know that about 85% of children master reading relatively easily, regardless of how they are taught, and that the other 15% have difficulties, sometimes very serious ones. ... The problem is exacerbated, however, by ideologically committed reading specialists, some of whom ignore the 85% and some of whom ignore the 15%. " (p. 53-full reference below)

The key part of this is that the vast majority of children learn to read without much problem–and it doesn't matter how they were taught. Some may remember the scene in the book "To Kill a Mockingbird" in which Scout is told that she hadn't learned to read properly because her father taught her. That's what's meant by "ideologically committed reading specialists". And note that Mockingbird predates whole language as a system to learn reading. With that in mind, we need to focus on the 15% who have problems, identify them early, and use more than one system with them to find the one that works for them.

At one point, I was taught by one of the key proponents of the Whole Language system. He was still furious about it because, and this is important, what was proposed by him and others was not what was brought in. Instead, a badly distorted version of what was originally proposed was implemented in most areas. For example, Whole Language, as originally proposed, included phonics. The proponents want phonics, but whole language where phonics doesn't work well (words like thought, caught, etc.)

Reference: Bereiter, C. (2002). Education and mind in the knowledge age. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

[I started this post earlier, but the window was accidentally closed, so this might be a partial re-post. Sorry]

Work specifically on how to teach children to use innovative thinking (design thinking) has been done at the Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto (www.ikit.org.) The Resources page on the website has links to some research papers on this. A couple of points:

• - Innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum. It needs to build on something. Often, we use a real-world problem that has no known solution for the kids to work on. These needn't be earth-shaking. For example, one of the major causes of injury is falling down stairs. So the kids can be presented with a problem in the form of, "How can we help to prevent people from falling down stairs?" There's quite a lot of physics, psychology and other design factors that can be explored here.
• - Innovation takes time, but most school curricula, especially in high-schools, leave no time for exploring and innovation. We need to change this.
• - The concept of the lonely inventor working in isolation until the "Eureka!" moment is something of a myth. It's never been true, and certainly, in the modern world, innovation is done in teams. See Johansson, F. (2006). The Medici Effect. What elephants and epidemics can teach us about innovation. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, for details about this. Another way of putting this is that in the modern world, an inventor working alone will be outpaced by an effective innovation team who can get things done faster because (1) they have more people on the job, and (2) such teams feature people with diverse skills, so the learning curve for the team as a whole is faster. We need a strong emphasis in the education system on how to work effectively in teams to solve problem, and currently we don't.

Unlike most of the directors who have made a Three Musketeers movie in recent years, Richard Lester seems to have actually read the book. Although there are some deviations, this movie best captures the spirit of the book and is a glorious romp through the period. It has a stellar cast and wonderful music. Because of contract disputes, it is in two parts, and the second part, Milady's Revenge (1974) is not well-known, but is every bit as good.

There have been a lot of good suggestions here. A number of comments have noted that for the "soft" sciences (I agree it's a terrible term,) statistics is more relevant. I think that this is the key for what you need to do. Find examples of where calculus is necessary to solve a problem in the social sciences and build your course around those relevant examples. People will work harder and understand better if the material can be shown to be relevant to them.

There are lists floating around the internet of the "best" or "favourite" episodes of the various Star Trek episodes. I'd choose one of the "best" episodes from the first series (The City on the Edge of Forever would be one good candidate) to introduce the characters and general situation, and then move to "best of" the other series.

Age 8 is a difficult one for science fiction, and you might be better off with fantasy. One book that my children fell in love with at that age was Barbara Sleigh's Carbonel (http://www.amazon.ca/Carbonel-Barbara-Sleigh/dp/0141319739/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340289236&sr=1-1). It was broadcast by the BBC at least twice as a radio drama in the 1950s. You might have to explain some of the background though, as it takes place in England just after WWII, when rationing was still in place, etc.

Another book that my children liked at quite a young age is André Norton's Star Man's Son (http://www.amazon.ca/Daybreak-2250-D-Star-Mans/dp/0449236145/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340289489&sr=1-1), which I believe was the first post-nuclear-apocalypse novel to be written and is still studied in some university courses.

With a bachelor's in math and a master's in education, your wife has a number of options open to her in the education field. One is to change level, and teach at a community college. These will be students with few, if any, behaviour problems, and that greatly reduces one's stress load.

A second option is to teach online. Again, there are few behaviour problems online (although flame wars are possible,) and I suspect your wife would find this satisfying. A bonus is that you can usually work from home when you teach online.

If you are thinking of teaching online, I recommend Palloff's and Pratt's book (see below) as a good starting point: Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2001). Lessons from the Cyberspace Classroom. The realities of online teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

You should probably contact the Canadian Embassy in Beijing. They would be in a good position to advise you how to proceed.

I was a secondary school teacher for many years. We used to allow open book tests. The students always found those to be the hardest. Many students wouldn't bother to study, since they could look up the answers. But looking up answers takes time, and exams are time-limited. I suspect that you will find exactly the same thing in your classes. Let them look up whatever they want, but structure the exam so that the questions are problems that require understanding of principles, not just recitation of facts, and you should be just fine.

E-learning is not only viable, but rapidly becoming essential. Many upgrading courses for adults, and these are becoming essential to any professional occupation, are conducted online. As a result, schools are going to have to teach children the skills needed to successfully work in online learning environments. It's no longer a frill, but as I say, an essential.

I am an instructor at a university in Canada, and I find it frustrating sometimes that I have 3rd- and 4th-year students who have never had any experience with online learning. It makes my job more difficult when I have to teach basic skills instead of the courses I am supposed to be teaching.

I currently run my courses in a hybrid manner, part traditional, and part online. This allows the students to feel comfortable with the traditional part of the course, and makes the online portion less intimidating. Here's a link to a paper I recently wrote about my class, and which describes the approach I take. The same approach with hybrid classes and software has been used in elementary and secondary schools.

The real problem with technology in schools is not the technology itself, but a lack of clear pedagogy on the part of the teacher. Just throwing technology into a class and waiting for a miracle to happen is ineffective. The teacher should decide which technologies support their teaching objectives and use those. The UNESCO Towards Knowledge Societies report (2005) states,

"Teacher training must therefore extend beyond the bounds of competency in a particular discipline and must include, as components in their own right, training in the new technologies and study of the ways and means of stimulating the students’ motivation and personal commitment. What they will need to learn, then, is not so much a technical skill as the ability to choose from among the increasingly abundant array of teaching and other software and educational programmes on offer, those that are most appropriate. Face-to-face tuition to learners, remains nonetheless essential in basic education. " (pp. 82-83)

Reference:

UNESCO. (2005). Towards Knowledge Societies. UNESCO World Report (p. 220). Paris: UNESCO Publishing.

I have a project in hand in which my science education students are creating lesson materials based on the work of the iDAPT lab in Toronto, Canada , a unique research facility that studies how adults with disabilities interact with their environment and other health care issues.

If you are interested, we could set up an online discourse environment for your class to work on the materials and interact with myself and my students about this work. We've designed the materials so that they align with the Ontario curriculum, which is very similar to most U.S. curricula, and each component includes a design challenge based on real-world problems for the children to work on.

My name is Dr. Donald N. Philip, and I can be reached at don.philip@utoronto.ca

I am currently a lecturer at a Canadian university, and I encourage my students to bring their laptops to class. I ask that they log onto our online environment and place comments or thoughts into it while I am lecturing. I feel that this engages the students more with the lecture, and gives them a focus as to how laptops can be used constructively in class.

We have to look ahead to the days, not long hence, when computers will be ubiquitous and either implants or part of the students' clothing. At such a time, banning computers in the classroom will be unenforceable, so we should work not on whether or not they should be banned, but on how they can best be used.

Most of the time, when such a project is undertaken, technical and technological factors get the first, and often the only, priority. What is left out is the human factor–how people with interact with, and use, the environment. There has now been considerable work done on this by human factors engineers. So before doing anything else for your control room, read Kim Vincente's book, "The Human Factor", especially the parts where he deals specifically with control rooms. Making the correct human factors decisions can reduce accidents and deaths resulting from poor design choices.

Reference: Vincente, K. (2003). The Human Factor. Revolutionizing the way people live with technology. Canada: Alfred A. Knopf. Amazon: http://www.amazon.ca/Human-Factor-Revolutionizing-Live-Technology/dp/0676974902/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1283779722&sr=1-1