I stare at my laptop screen, trying to ignore the butterflies in my stomach. I click “Launch Meeting” and a Zoom window opens. One by one, I watch faces and names appear in the video chat. But they aren’t the familiar faces of clients or colleagues — the ten people on this Zoom call are students enrolled in a course I’m teaching.

Me? A teacher? Since when? While I have given dozens of presentations about my work over the past few years, I have never officially “taught” anything before. But when I gave a presentation about being a full-time freelance science communicator at Science Talk last March, Allison Coffin, president of the Association of Science Communicators, asked me about the possibility of expanding my 20-minute talk into an online course.