Member-only story
The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers started because of outrage, curiosity, and a love of teaching. I’d been teaching part-time for a community college and when I looked at what I was getting paid versus what the students were getting charged, I thought the discrepancy was pretty big, even when I factored in the support system and structure the college provided.
Google Hangouts had just started, and when I looked at the feature, it occurred to me that it was pretty well suited for a small class. I was curioous how that might work, and so I put the word out online and started teaching that six week class on my own. After a while, it seemed to me that some sections needed to be their own classes, because we were spending so much time on them. In answer to that I created classes like Literary Techniques for Genre Writers and Creating an Online Presence for Writers.
Things weren’t entirely painless. Google was prone to changing Hangouts features pretty regularly, and the help docs were invariably a few versions behind. But among other things, it let me record the class sessions, which meant I could not only offer those recordings to the students, but I could go back and look at what worked and what didn’t. Other pain points were time zones — when someone’s dialing in from Australia at 2 AM their time, they can get confused by time zone changes, and I soon learned that days…
