As the coronavirus continues to spread across the US, schools and universities are starting to end semesters early or conduct classes online instead of in person. https://t.co/eUXAJ5dDBK
— CNN (@CNN) March 10, 2020
Pulled all this out, as being of immediate interest to some portion of the Jackaltariat:
"Morris and others have also emphasized that a transition to online teaching must keep classes accessible for students with disabilities and students who may lack access to the internet or other technology at home." https://t.co/gHLOBf5Dte
— Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer) March 9, 2020
… Several universities have been circulating guidance to faculty about how to teach via online methods during an emergency. Guidance from the University of California, Los Angeles, to faculty noted that the administration has purchased more licenses for Zoom. The university also drew attention to a lockdown browser available for faculty to use during assessments, which provides a full audio and video recording of the test attempt.
Faculty have similarly been circulating their own guidance to peers about how to teach online on the fly, sometimes with step-by-step instructions. Instructional design and technology administrators have emphasized that temporarily moving in-person classes to remote learning is different from designing and developing a course that is completely online.
“Teaching well online requires a much more intentional arc of planning and learning around design and pedagogy,” Penelope Adams Moon, director of online learning strategy at UW’s Bothell campus, posted on Twitter. “We need stop-gap measures, but they aren’t the same as online teaching.”
Sean Michael Morris, director of the Digital Pedagogy Lab at the University of Colorado at Denver, advised instructors to rethink grading around participation and attendance…
All N. American students/alumni/staff/faculty who would like to encourage colleges and universities to take stronger, pro-active action to #flattenthecurve of #covid19, even *before* there are cases in your community, please consider signing this petition. https://t.co/4PpNesHLXG
— Maren L Friesen (@symbiomics) March 8, 2020
1/ The #CoronavirusOutbreak has prompted some colleges to cancel in-person classes. Follow this thread for a list of those institutions.
— The Chronicle of Higher Education (@chronicle) March 9, 2020
It would be better to have a weblink that is updated periodically.
— Dr. Raza Khan (@dr_raza_khan) March 9, 2020
— jenn (@sayitchowda) March 10, 2020
Amherst campus will remain open. Students who wish to stay can petition to do so. According to the college communications, the concern is students returning to campus after traveling for break. It seems as though students who stay on campus are welcome https://t.co/CKFjXXBd92
— Kathleen O’Connor (@Dr_KOConnor) March 10, 2020
… not every college student has a home they can go to
… not every college student can just buy a plane ticket for NEXT MONDAY
… not every college student has broadband at home
… not every college student can eat without the meal plan/work study
… not every— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 10, 2020
… not every college student has their own computer
… not every college student owns their textbooks. Some have to go to the library for every reading.
… not every disabled student can get the accommodations they need in an online setting— Libby Morse (@madlibbs15) March 10, 2020
…not every college student has a laptop
…”they can join remote lectures on their phones” but not every college student has unlimited data— Dr. Kristjana (@kristjanahronn) March 10, 2020
Then there are the students who have homes they could go to, but that aren’t safe and that they make plans to avoid on scheduled breaks.
That one can’t even be estimated using financial aid stats.— Sarah ????????????? (@sosomanysarahs) March 10, 2020
Similar situation for me. Rural university in Iowa. I know a great deal about converting classes to online but how many will be able to take them in a pinch? Got an email today to prepare to do this. Not officially announced yet but I think it’s coming.
— ??Nickie the Elder, Last of Her Name (@DocNickie) March 10, 2020
My analysis on the “early adapters”: that’s a lot of endowment money. https://t.co/ctML2o8Lda
— Matt Dowell (@dowellml) March 10, 2020
#twitterstorians Reminder that there is already a guide to teaching the history of plague (cause of the longest history of pandemics) available online: "On Learning How to Teach the Black Death": https://t.co/j4aqjKazkt. (Also in German: https://t.co/YzeqxBVAjY.) pic.twitter.com/8PO4psSuMt
— Monica H Green (@monicaMedHist) March 9, 2020
Cheryl Rofer
We seem to have a lot of professors and other teachers in the jackaltariat, so let me suggest that they share tips on distance teaching in this thread.
(I was just about to write a post saying that, but you beat me to it, AL!)
dmsilev
In addition to the challenges listed in some of those tweets, there are also a lot of classes that, by their very nature, cannot be taught remotely. Labs. Shop classes. Art studios. Etc.
Kent
HS Science teacher here.
How easy it is to teach online really depends on the subject. I’ve found that there is about 10X more good biology material than chemistry of physics. I’m not exactly sure why that is, except that I guess there is a lot more cutting edge life science happening today than physics or chemistry. At least at the level taught at HS. There aren’t any commercial physics labs out there re-testing Newton’s Laws, for example, but there are lots of them doing microbiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, ecology, etc.
My school uses google classroom which is basically facebook for schools. Works pretty well.
The best online classes are when you engage the brighter kids in the class to help out and do tutorial questions and such on their own. It is great to log into a class, find students with questions, and then see that there are students already there providing answers.
Yutsano
You can’t teach music remotely. You can’t really teach art or pottery remotely. There are students who will be majorly screwed because of this lockdown.
Omnes Omnibus
@Yutsano: They should have majored in something useful. /s
zhena gogolia
Our university hasn’t made the decision yet, but it seems to be following Harvard’s lead. We are scrambling. We have a “workshop” on thursday, but it’s spring break so I’m not sure how many will show up or how useful it will be.
jeffreyw
I read the news today, Oh Boy!
TomatoQueen
I don’t see St John’s doing itself online on either campus, as the teaching and the learning are through conversation, with props (blackboard and chalk in my day, occasional slides, or an overhead projector if feeling frisky and teaching Maxwell’s equations). Highly likely that it would be easier to go on all-campus lockdown, tho’ faculty would hate it.
zhena gogolia
@TomatoQueen:
What does “all-campus lockdown” mean?
Brachiator
To be honest, I thought more computer-oriented learning was already taking place. I always see students with laptops and tablets at coffee shops watching video lectures, doing video based homework, marking up PDFs of lectures and notes, etc.
I have also worked for companies where work sessions and training, not just relatively more passive meetings, were conducted via video conferencing. The IT folks had access to various resources that could be deployed for employee and customer training.
TomatoQueen
@zhena gogolia: For St John’s in Annapolis, it would be quarantine for a 36-acre self contained campus 1 block away from the state capitol buildings, in an 18th century town with tiny one-way streets that is otherwise eminently walkable. Deliveries go to one parking lot; all students live on campus (nobody can afford town rents any more), nobody goes there unless they need to anyway. For the Santa Fe campus, which is up in the mountains 3 miles from town, it would be more monastic, with snow.
Trying to imagine such a scenario makes my head spin–the college doesn’t function as itself without all face to face all the time contact.
Punchy
@dmsilev: This was my thought. How do you teach a bio or org chem lab online? What about endo labs that use live animals? Are office hours still allowed if the campus is closed?
BrotherMaynard
My son is in kindergarten and his school district sent out a notice they are exploring this as well. If the schools are forced to close, they will move classes online. The schools will provided laptops to the students who need them and they are looking into providing MiFi devices for students who don’t have internet access at home.
I have no idea how this will work with a kindergartener, but you do what needs to be done.
They also announced they are looking to maintaining the free and reduced lunches throughout any closure as well.
Ohio Mom
Jeffryw@7: I can see very interesting cross-discipline seminars being taught next fall.
This is a deeply teachable moment, not just about biology but politics and government, psychology, sociology, statistics, economics, and other fields that will come to my mind later…this is a huge event that can be used to help young people learn how to interpret information and be judicious about evaluating sources.
I’ve seen many comments across the blogosphere talk about how the U.S.’s lack of universal health coverage and skimpy safety net are/will be combining to make things much, much worse for us.
Here is where another progressive complaint becomes more real. A lot of students are going to have classes to make up, lengthening their college career.
It’s going to add up to a huge expense that a good number of students will find hard to meet. I won’t be surprised if there is an increase in tne drop-out rate. The ones who don’t drop-out will be facing extra loan debt.
All of which wouldn’t be as much of an issue if college was free or at least truly affordable.
K488
@TomatoQueen: Two of my sons are graduates from St. Johns. I can’t see remote learning in any way replacing what they received in their education. On the other hand, I’m dealing with 160 first-year music students in two big lectures, with break-out drill sections handled by a group of six AI’s (grad instructors). Just not sure how that’s going to be managed, although I’ve already got tons of stuff online. But face-to-face is crucial, even for this kind of learning.
zhena gogolia
@TomatoQueen:
But do faculty have to stay on campus? Do they all live there?
BGinCHI
@TomatoQueen: Do you teach at St. John’s?
Peter Kanelos is a good friend of mine. How’s he doing as President?
BGinCHI
@zhena gogolia: It’s our last week before break, and I don’t think anything will happen until the week after.
Hoping we can limp to the end of April and get the semester over with….
Trying to figure out how I’m gonna teach my one summer course online, if I have to.
PenAndKey
Short answer? You don’t. As a microbiologist I tell anyone that ever asks that my time working as a lab TA and in the department prep lab were the best “classes” I ever took. A lab without time at the bench handling cultures, looking through a scope or at a gel, or prepping materials is pointless. This is equally true in a chemistry lab, where you’re learning colorimetric titration, how to set up a schlenk line, or how to properly grind and press an FTIR sample (among other things). Unless you’re the Task Master you’re not going to train the necessary muscle memory for critical lab skills just watching a live stream. If you could, Youtube would be a viable alternative to college.
Kelly
My 83 year old Mom plans to spend today getting ready for a long stay at home. She lives a few minutes away from us and my brother about five miles away so we can keep her supplied. I’m 63 and he’s 61 so we’re not in the clear ourselves. As retired folk we always grocery shop weekday mornings when the stores aren’t crowded so that’ll help keep some distance. I’m going to wear gloves.
Badgetoon
@Yutsano: The Academy of Art San Francisco has had an online program for 20 years doing exactly that, it works and you can give people a good education
sherparick
Given that the Surgeon General spoke about President Yam’s ability to go without sleep, perhaps this article on Adderall abuse has even more relevance. https://shcs.ucdavis.edu/blog/more-you-adderall-less-you-sleep
I really could have avoided this part of “may you live in interesting times” part of the curse.
Kent
One thing you probably do is rearrange your syllabus so that the topics that lend themselves more to online study you cover now, and save the more hands-on labs until later. So, for example, if you are teaching biology, this would be a good time to cover evolution. There are not that many wet labs that cover evolution. It’s going to be more reading, worksheets, videos, and such. And there are a lot of good online resources. By contrast you’d probably not want to cover protists or cell biology now which generally is taught with a lot of microscope labs.
In the sciences there will probably be a lot of rearranging of course sequences to accommodate this.
evap
My university has been offering training to faculty on remote learning using Canvas and Zoom. I am so glad that I am on sabbatical this semester and don’t have any classes to worry about. Emory is right next door to the CDC and we are partners, so we are getting good advise :) We are currently on spring break and I expect they will tell students who are home to stay home any day now.
Feathers
Harvard just announced that undergrad students have to move out of their dorms by March 15. Having worked there, I’m wondering who they are planning to move in. Harvard houses faculty in dorms when there are snowstorms and they feel they won’t be able to make it in. Will they house hospital staff from the Harvard teaching hospitals there? People who are quarantined? One thing to not is that Harvard’s dorms are set up as suites, so there are X number of people in a suite with a shared bathroom, not rooms off a hall. So you could do quarantine/semi-quarantine housing there fairly easily compared to the rooms off a hallway dorm model. I am guessing that they will leave one of the houses (large dorms) open for students who don’t have a home to return to.
BGinCHI
@Feathers: According to Q, it will house Hillary Clinton and a raft of other libs.
catclub
@jeffreyw:
If you teach it well, will it perform better(!?)
Timurid
My school (a red state university) is literally weeks behind the curve. The only official communications we’ve received are ‘we’re monitoring the situation, be sure to wash your hands’ and (this morning) ‘we’re not funding travel to China and Italy because that might be bad.’ I’m pretty sure I’m not going to have to worry about juggling online conversions, because these people would crawl over broken glass for the next two months rather than abandon or disrupt a semester. But if I end up sick and stuck at home, they’re not going to get one more minute of work from me…
zhena gogolia
@BGinCHI:
I’m going to patch something together as best I can. They’ll larn a thing or two about Dostoevsky. It won’t be the same, but then nothing is going to be the same for a while.
Feathers
I just left a longer post about Harvard housing on that thread.
I’ll give my thoughts here as a student who has done online learning both excellent (Harvard Extension) and good (WGU). I know that people are using this to talk about more higher ed moving online, so I’ll give my observations.
Harvard Extension offers in person only Extension classes, online only Extension classes, Extension classes you can take either in person or online, as well as online Extension classes which are based on recorded Harvard College class lectures. The Harvard College classes which are taught have their own separate teaching support staff. However, most of these are larger lecture classes where the students would mostly be interacting with TAs anyway. Extension has started offering online classes with an on campus component, where students come to campus for a Friday-Sunday weekend intensive. To get a degree through the Extension School you do have to spend two semesters on-campus in Cambridge. So it is not entirely an online degree.
As to the difference in online vs in person. I was actually on campus, so I was able to experience some classes both in person and recorded. The in person lectures were great, but being able to pause and rewatch parts of the lecture is also fantastic, so to me that was kind of a wash. You do hear the comments and questions people make in class, so you have that. The comments on the online boards are just not the same, perhaps because students think through what they are going to say when it is in person. Also, it is easier to ignore bozos if you can see them and judge their demeanor.
I’ll put my very different experiences with WGU in another post. I’ve also worked faculty support for many years, so ask me any questions you may have.
Feathers
Reading this thread, I should offer consulting. Ha!
I got my certificate in Web Development a few weeks after the dot com crash. Am currently finishing up an online degree in Business with an IT Management specialty. I have taken an instructional design class. My timing is shit.
BGinCHI
@zhena gogolia: I hear you. At least I can run some chats like I do here at B-J.
In fact, I might have to turn Medium Cool into a class…..two birds with one stone.
Martin
So, I’m going to quibble with the post title. Most of the closures since Friday have been preventative. Yes, almost all of us have students in quarantine, mostly due to study abroad students returning and students attending conferences.
The thinking behind these closures is that a 400 student lecture hall or a dorm cafeteria is like a fire hose for spreading disease, and if mitigation is going to work, we need to cut that down to a garden hose, or even a spray bottle. We’ve given up not spreading it at all – that cruise ship has sailed and returned.
We aren’t ending instruction. We’re trying to figure out how to continue 100% of instruction but in a manner that will minimize spread. UC Berkeley’s strategy is a good example – labs and performances continue, while lectures move online. Sanitizing a lecture hall between classes is basically impossible. But a 30 student lab, if you’ve eliminated the need to deal with the lecture hall? That’s totally doable. What program has a lot of hands-on learning? Nursing. We gotta graduate them. We need every nurse we can get. We have students in public health that counties need.
So we take the classes that can’t go online (my faculty would say that’s all of their classes, so I get to tell them to STFU, here’s your class at 10 other universities that’s offered online) and focus all of our efforts on them. Students can still do all of their work, they still graduate on time, they become a MUCH smaller vector for community transmission, and we protect the rest of the institution which is busy running the hospital, the testing labs, the microscopy labs, etc. You want this disease sequenced and tracked, treatment developed, clinics and hospitals operating – then I’ve got to keep my faculty healthy, and a lot of them are over 60.
So, our eye is to keeping as many people healthy as possible without stopping the work of the institution for anyone – students studying, the public that needs our services, etc. This is workable.
Kent
@Feathers: Harvard University is worth $40 BILLION dollars. The MEDIAN family income of Harvard students is $168,000. For some reason the problem of temporarily homeless Harvard students does not rise to the top of the things that I’m concerned about.
Just saying!
I’m not dinging on you Feathers. Your stuff is interesting. I’m just trying to add some perspective.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Walker
Real time discussions going on about this here right now. Concern is you cannot just “slap” courses online. If you do not have the infrastructure for substantial personal interaction then this threatens financial aid for the semester.
JustRuss
The fact that we can’t do everything online doesn’t mean we should do nothing. Packing 400 students into a lecture hall doesn’t offer much more interaction than recording a lecture and posting it online, shutting down most of the lecture classes would not be very disruptive. My university has had the tools to do this for over a decade, but they seem to be in do-nothing-until-it’s-too-late mode.
Walker
@Kent: Harvard may not have a lot of poor undergraduates, but there are a not insignificant number on a free ride. Once you start pushing the costs to the student (in a way that cannot be recovered from financial aid) they will feel it.
GC
We stay in session to the end of the week, then go on spring break (spreading the virus randomly on the beaches of Mexico), then go exclusively online, for which we are almost totally unprepared. Faculty will get one hour of training. A few have some experience with hybrid formats.
Doing online courses properly requires resources we do not have on this scale, and planning for which there is insufficient time. Under those constraints meeting special needs appropriately will not actually happen across the board. Getting through the remainder of the semester without too much damage for students with internet access is a plausible goal, and my guess is that many requirements will simply be waived.
In any case we do not have a better alternative available so it is good that some administrations are stepping up to their responsibilities.
As with vaccination, the main point is not to protect the individual, but to protect the community. Public health measures won’t accomplish much unless they are reasonably widespread, uniform, and enforced, but it is certainly worth attempting what we can, even if the federal government is AWOL this time around. Since we are past containment and in the mitigation phase, the goal now is to reduce the peak load to something our health care system, such as it is, can deal with.
zhena gogolia
@BGinCHI:
Haha, do you really want your students mixing with the jackals?
Feathers
@Kent: I completely agree! It’s more the implications of having students move out of their rooms (meaning someone else can move in) as opposed to telling students not to come back that is what is intriguing me. I’d also like to push back a bit on saying Harvard problems don’t matter, because if the Harvard students are having problems, it points to where people without their resources are going to need help.
My guess is also that they aren’t announcing backup plans for students who don’t have an easy place to go to so that more students go home with friends.
It really is interesting is seeing how thinking of “what about problem X” first really does shut off needed actions in an emergency. There are so many people who don’t seem to understand that systems can be overwhelmed. It reminds me of my aunt getting very angry with my uncle because he slammed the car breaks and increased her headache, even though she acknowledged that he did so to (narrowly) avoid hitting a car that pulled out in front of us.
Kent
Harvard is the wealthiest university on the planet BY FAR. And the number of Harvard students who come from modest means is pretty small. They can take care of their own. Only 3% of Harvard students come from the bottom 20% and only 5% of Harvard students come from the bottom 40%. They will be OK. Harvard can put them all up in private estates for the duration and not even reach the rounding error on their annual budget.
If there are Harvard students suffering, it is because Harvard chose to let that happen
@Feathers: Yes, there is canary in the coal mine thing happening. Much more interesting and challenging is how big universities that actually serve poor populations are going to accommodate this change. Like, for example, UT-San Antonio which has about 30,000 students that are mostly first-generation Hispanic students from very modest means. I worked there for a short spell. They are going to have some real challenges compared to a place like Harvard. There are hundreds of big universities around the country that are more like UT-San Antonio than Harvard.
Erin in Flagstaff
I work at a university, and we’re all in meetings on how to prepare for this. As I’m one of the staff members who support faculty with online courses, I have a feeling that the quiet spring break I expected next week will be much busier, especially if they announce cancellations of in-person classes by the end of the week.
We have no coronavirus cases in our county, but after spring break, if students come back, we could see some. It will be an “interesting” week for us.
TomatoQueen
@zhena gogolia: Only the college nurse lives on campus, all the other grownups are scattered all over Anne Arundel County. It’s a tiny community.
BGinCHI
@Martin: Good points here, Martin.
And thanks for all your reporting and posting on this topic.
BGinCHI
@zhena gogolia: Builds character.
Martin
I’ve helped a lot of faculty develop online classes. Here’s some advice:
BGinCHI
@Kent: We’re almost exactly like UT-SA (we’re an HSA as well), and yes, it’s a resources question.
The tech at Harvard and R1s is way different than regionals, JCs, etc.
As are the available means for students to access.
BGinCHI
@TomatoQueen: Did you see my question above? About SJC?
mali muso
@Walker: I thought I saw some recent guidance pushed out earlier this week vis-a-vis Financial Aid that seemed to indicate that given the evolving situation, there was going to be more flexibility on that. I know we just (finally) got word that DHS is going to allow for some exceptions to the general rule that international students have to be in face-to-face classes if the university has to move to online format for a time. Interesting times.
Soprano2
The first thing I thought is that all the music students are screwed, because the performance classes are essential, and choir, orchestra and band just cannot be done online. Plus, what about concerts – who wants to give a concert with no audience? I find myself selfishly worrying about whether our concerts will be cancelled after we spent half a semester working on music for them. The state university where I sing goes on spring break next week; so far no cases have been detected in my city. Plus, the music department has a significant amount of overseas students, plus two of the choir grad students are from overseas (South Africa and Korea). What a mess.
Feathers
@Martin: Having prepped for online as well, the number one factor in video quality is lighting. Get an external camera. Watch some YouTubes on producing video. Your computer monitor can be an excellent lighting source. Set the background to white and bright. Find the right camera and computer monitor angles. Then tweak the monitor color until it suits your complexion. Darker skintones do better with a yellow/gold color. If you use a bookcase as a background (good!), be sure to check that the titles are all ones you want to share with the world.
FlyingToaster
One of the Harvard problems is students from overseas (yes, we still have a few), who will lose their visas if all courses go online. So Harvard will be housing them, along with anyone who can’t travel home.
The Hub (Greater Boston) is home to about 600,000 students. And I can guarantee you that MIT, BU, BC, Tufts, Suffolk, Emerson, Lesley, Simmons, etc. will be following Harvard’s lead. Not because they want to, but because we already have about 4x as many cases as reported (non-testing of symptomatic cases since February 23) and the med schools are quite aware of where this is all headed.
I’m hoping that the public schools stay open, if only because there is NO childcare capacity left. WarriorGirl’s (private) school will stay open until someone goes symptomatic. At which point they’ll probably be closing for a month and taking the classes online. All middleschoolers are issued a chromebook; I understand they’ve got a line on rentals of chomebooks for any 4-5 kids w/o laptops at home, and tablets for the PK-3 students. It’s going to be nightmarish because a majority of the parents work in professions with little remote capacity.
Around here, we’re all clear on what’s about to happen. So shelves are cleaned out at Costco and BJs and Target, and only bodegas have any hand sanitizer left.
TomatoQueen
@BGinCHI: Second try. Many many 405 errors these days.
I’m an alumna, never on the plane of existence or talent necessary to teach, tho I am pleased to see some classmates are Tutors now.
As for Kanelos. Well. This is contentious and now that my long reply is lost in the aether, let me say that he hasn’t been there long enough for judgment. I think Johnnies as a lively, opinionated community will allow him sufficient time and effort to accomplish what he seems to have set out to do, and hope that the early negatives won’t be repeated. This will not be a smooth road and the College has not been an institution to adapt to the times except with great reluctance; rather fighting modern academe is a hobby, a hobby-horse, and an obsession, in the sense that our forbears fought the Naval Academy and won, and we shall continue in that enterprise in all its manifestations. What I’d like is if new non-Johnnie administrators would do something like take a sophomore math tutorial (Ptolemy and Apollonius) to get a feel for the daily work–but of course they don’t have time. Anyway good luck to him.
Martin
@BGinCHI: I encourage my faculty to give ASU a strong look. They’re a well regarded university and have grown substantially on the back on their online offerings.
I’ve written about my objections to the free college for all policies lacking support for expansion of access. The bottleneck for my institution, as almost all others, is physical infrastructure. Dorms, classrooms, labs. We can ramp up faculty hiring relatively quickly. Research faculty are slow because we’re trying to fill narrow speciality niches , but full-time teaching faculty is pretty quick – broader net being cast. But a lab is $1000/sq ft to build. A single 1400 square foot lab is $1.4M. Dorms, lecture halls – assuming you even have space (half of the UC campuses are out of space, so new building requires tearing a currently used building down) takes 2 years minimum, more like 7 if you need a teardown/replacement.
But if you can mix residential with online programs, and mix in-person with online, particularly if you can do self-paced online, you can reach a lot of low income students. For public universities, room and board is anywhere from 50% to 80% of the cost. A CalState will cost $28,000 total for 4 years, provided you can skip the room and board. You can pay as you go with a part time job/full time in summer. And if you can’t $28K in loans isn’t great, but it’s manageable.
But the best solution IMO is to throw out the Carnegie factory model. We teach around the concept that time is an independent variable and mastery is a dependent one. A course is a fixed duration but we give grades to reflect how much or little they learned. The goal is to learn it all, so flip that. Make mastery the independent variable and the time the dependent one. That’s what self-paced learning does. The course ends at 100% mastery, but how long that takes the student will vary. But, the student has control – they don’t need to wait for the instructor, they can put more time in when it’s convenient for them. Put a time limit on the course and assign a grade at the end,
The main problem with this approach isn’t that it’s too difficult to implement – it’s totally doable – it’s that the approach is incompatible with how we pay instructors and how instructors envision their job. It’s a threat, and requires a major overhaul of how we hire and pay teachers. That’s hard. That’s ‘implement single payer’ hard.
Feathers
One note for any faculty here who are going to run an online class. Always set up a channel/thread for off topic discussions. Without one, there will be side chatter in your main threads because there is no “after class.” Also, requiring an online response to a reading, with two analytic comments on other people’s responses is something that works well. You can hide the responses until after the deadline if that works for you. Always make the comments have a deadline a few days after the responses are due.
Martin
@Feathers: This has gotten a lot easier, again thanks to youtube. There’s a real market for inexpensive studio quality equipment.
Check Amazon for softbox lights.
And there are countless Youtube lighting tutorials. Basically, y’all are becoming Youtubers. Lean into it, learn from them. It’ll be okay.
Feathers
@Martin: Yes on a lot of this. One interesting model is the idea of campuses with specialties. Visiting Fredericton, NB, I learned that the art scene was so amazing because of the craft college there. They accepted four year students, of course, but there was also the expectation that students majoring in art, design or craft would come and do their junior year there.
I can see a model where students come to campus as first years, go home to study online and then come back for either junior or senior year to get in person instruction again. This might not be on the same campus as the first year and would probably depend on what your major was. Of course, there would need to be some supportive housing for students who needed it for all four years, but it could be a better model than what we have now.
Feathers
@Martin: My teacher said to use your monitor until you could justify buying a lighting rig. But to always get a second camera. Squinting into the laptop camera is terrible to watch. Sad!
Martin
Last bit, if you are in a field where students have labs/equipment. Look at the state of digital hardware. Years ago you needed to sign out expensive cameras for your film/photography students. Now, you can do a hell of a lot with a smartphone. Yes, you want them to use the real equipment to get experience with the full range of techniques, but there’s a lot to be said for learning how to get budget equipment to punch above its weight.
The EE faculty were shocked to discover that for about $200 a student can have an entire basic circuits lab in their dorm room. It’s great. $200 isn’t nothing, but institutionally it’d be cheaper to hand these out than build that $1.4M lab above, and because the student is using their equipment and has it all the time, they learn it better, and use it more, and learn more. My daughter did her biology lab at home. Got a nice kit with everything including the things she was to dissect. She took photos and videos to demonstrate her work. Worked out great. The formaldehyde smell in the kitchen was a bit disorienting – very out of place.
Martin
@Feathers: Yeah. I think a very good model would be to look at the ⅔ or so of your curriculum that could move to a self-paced approach and then concentrate your resources on the other ⅓ and make the experiential learning piece much better. That fits with what you’re describing. In a residential program it might be one course per term which is experiential and somewhat comprehensive and the rest self-paced. Or you could break it up by year like you describe. Lots of approaches.
BGinCHI
@TomatoQueen: Thanks for this.
He’s a good guy, but I’m not surprised to hear about mistakes, given what they’re trying to do in terms of tuition, cutting budgets, etc.
I hope he succeeds so that the college succeeds. It’s an admirable institution.
TomatoQueen
@BGinCHI: Oh you’re welcome, always glad to talk about SJC. Just wish the commenting system weren’t so pernickety today.
rekoob
@BGinCHI: @TomatoQueen: Late to the thread, as usual, but allow another Johnnie to weigh in: both Kanelos and Roosevelt are doing well at a difficult job, as I see it (I’ve been active in the alumni community for decades). I was not a big supporter of the tuition reset, but I’m glad to have been proven wrong. The budget is not quite there yet, but they’re working on it, and I’m pleased to see at least some streamlining of the College’s structure, even if it means more work for us alumni as volunteers and boosters. The capital campaign is going quite well, and both Kanelos and Roosevelt enjoy good rapport with the whole College community. The faculty are not uniformly happy, but it was ever thus. On balance, I think things are better than expected, and an improvement over where we were before they (collectively) arrived.
I’ll also declare an interest — Kanelos not only a Maroon (as am I) but more particularly a Social Thoughter, widely considered to be where the St. John’s program meets its logical extension. I’m fortunate to have many friends who did their work there, toiling away in the stacks while I was honing my networking skills at Booth.
BGinCHI
@rekoob: I’m sorry to hear you were also in the Committee, but you seem like a decent person.
Kidding (kind of).
When I first went to grad school, to do an MA in Political Philosophy, the program director was a Committee PhD (on Hume, FFS). He was a complete fucking asshole. The only benefit is that he taught me how much I’d need to fight back to make it in academia.
Anyway, thanks for this info. Peter is a smart guy and a hard working guy, who will fight the good fight.
rekoob
@BGinCHI: Ah, to be clear, I had classmates from St. John’s who were at the Committee, but I was getting my MBA at Booth. I still admire the dedication that the Social Thoughters had, but also recognize that they can easily rub people the wrong way (and there’s a good chance I know who you’re talking about). Again, as a Johnnie, my pain threshold is probably higher than others.
Not surprisingly, Peter has reasserted his Greek roots and is uniformly known as Pano. We also made the inspired decision to replace the long-time President’s House (a lovely, waterfront spread but a bear to maintain) with a very nice place across the street from the Annapolis campus. He and his family have settled in splendidly.
Since you were kind enough to keep the conversation going, I’ll also note (once again, late to the thread) that I first saw a great film noir at St. John’s that would have been appropriate for Sunday’s conversation — Green for Danger (1946). The Film Society at St. John’s was one of the highlights of my time there.
BGinCHI
@rekoob: OK, sorry for the mix-up. I have plenty of B School snark, but I’ll spare you.
I see Peter is going that route with his name, which is cool. If I ever show up to campus, I’ll probably call him “Petey” until he has security remove me. Seriously, I hope he hangs in there and does some good. What an IDEAL position he has, despite all the work & difficulty. I always wanted to go to SJC after I discovered its existence, which was later. As a poor country kid in IN, I’d never heard of it or anything like it.
I’ve never seen Green for Danger! Will try to remedy. And agreed on student film series. I really got turned on to film that way.