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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Colleges Gear Up for an Uncertain Fall Semester Online

When the coronavirus pandemic descended on college campuses last spring, Carl Zarate joined the thousands of students whose worlds shrunk abruptly from expansive lecture halls to Zoom screens. The Cal State Fullerton junior recalls taking a difficult organic chemistry exam in his bedroom at home, racing to figure out an unfamiliar online testing platform, using the Wi-Fi that he shares with his parents, grandparents, and younger sister. Zarate suspects that his professor, also a stranger to the screens that supplanted the classroom, made the test needlessly complex for fear of students cheating. “It just wasn’t ideal,” he says.

Colleges and universities across the country made the hasty transition to distance learning this spring. And as the fall approaches, with Covid-19 cases spiking in some areas and no certainty of a vaccine on the horizon, schools must confront the question of how to resume classes safely. Since physical distancing guidelines limit the number of students that can occupy one classroom, the question for many colleges and universities across the country isn’t whether to implement some form of online learning, but how.

In April, Cal State Fullerton became one of the first campuses in the country to announce plans to offer the majority of classes online in the fall. The rest of the schools in the California State University system, whose 23 campuses serve nearly 500,000 students, soon followed suit. Zarate, a premed student, says he understands the precautions his school is taking for his upcoming senior year, but he still worries about his grades and whether he’ll be able to learn online material effectively. “It makes me a little bit nervous,” he says. “How am I going to do this semester?”

Elsewhere, as the summer progresses, colleges are concretizing their plans for the fall semester. Some are enacting models that combine in-person and online instruction. The University of Texas system expects students to arrive on campus earlier in August, with up to one-fifth of all classes to be offered online. UT students will complete final exams remotely after the Thanksgiving holiday, in anticipation of a potential second wave of the virus in winter. Cornell University proposed a “library” of six options, with some distance-learning components in each scenario. Florida State University has outlined a multiphased approach, noting that educators are “exploring new and creative ways to use technology to deliver classes in a variety of alternate modes using flexible formats.”

If the official messaging sounds inconclusive and encumbered with jargon, it isn’t lost on students, who have taken to TikTok to air their frustration with their schools’ nebulous bulletins about the fall.

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For their part, schools, faculty, and administrators are making decisions about reopening amid a fog of unknowns. The many unanswered questions about the coronavirus, from how it’s transmitted outdoors to how it attacks the body, make planning for the future a slippery proposition. So the six or seven weeks before classes resume are all the more crucial: If the spring challenged schools to leap into digital survival mode in a matter of days, the summer provides administrators and faculty with some (but not much) time to prepare for the fast-approaching fall.

Hybrid Learning

Depending on their school’s stance on online instruction, faculty will be expected to prepare for a new format of teaching—often on their own time. “Most of us don’t usually teach online. We have to prepare in the summer,” says Parvin Shahrestani, an assistant professor of biology at Cal State Fullerton. “Now the tricky part about that is that faculty isn’t paid in the summer.” While she’s glad that online instruction will keep herself and her students safe, Shahrestani expects to spend at least 100 unpaid hours redesigning lectures, assessments, and student interactions, including accessibility considerations for her students with disabilities.

“I want to teach face-to-face,” says Letisha Brown, an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Tech. “Of course, that would be the dream and the ideal. But I also really respect taking care of my health and the health of those around me.” At VT, professors have some input over how they will teach their classes; Brown is likely to elect to teach her course, a 16-person seminar on the Black sport experience, fully online. “One of the things that’s important to me and all of my classes is developing community, because I teach really tough subjects,” she says. She’s thinking through how to cultivate trust and openness between her students over fully virtual platforms.

For schools that are moving forward with a hybrid of online and in-person instruction, faculty will have to adapt to a new mode of teaching entirely. This is the case for Rob Elliott, senior lecturer of computer and informational technology at IUPUI, Indiana University, and Purdue University’s shared campus in Indianapolis. In a normal semester, Elliott’s teaching involves small group work, whiteboards, Post-Its, and a lot of moving around the classroom—on an average teaching day, he clocks in 12,000 steps on his Fitbit. In the spring, he was able to migrate his teaching across tools like Zoom and Google docs. But the fall will present a new challenge: Purdue and Indiana University have announced plans to offer classes both online and in person. That means about half of Elliott’s students will be in the classroom, while the other half tune in from afar.

“I’ve created classrooms that are really active and engaging. I’ve created online courses that are really active and engaging,” says Elliott. “But having people spread between the classroom as well as online is really a third type of classroom, and it’s not something we can just pull out of a hat.”

Some students, still reeling from the chaos of the spring, are questioning the value of an online or partially online education at all. In a country where tuition at a private, four-year college costs an average of $32,410 per year, the transition to distance learning has called into question the dollar value of college coursework. If not face-to-face interaction with a professor, then what are students paying for? Last spring, students and families filed lawsuits against colleges, seeking tuition refunds and citing a lowered quality of instruction. Student petitions have tried to pressure Cal State and University of California schools into lowering tuition for the next, majority-online semester, with no success.

But the disruption of last semester doesn’t mean that online education is inherently worse than in-person instruction or can’t be done well, says Elliott. It just needs to be designed thoughtfully, with expectations communicated clearly to students.

“If there’s anything I would like to see, it’s that we stop trying to compare what we wish the semester could be and instead talk about what we are actually able to provide,” he says. Elliott, who’s also not paid over the summer, expects to spend “weeks” fine-tuning his lesson plans for the fall. He recently bought a green screen to create more exciting video backgrounds for his students.

All schools can do now is prepare for the uncertainties of fall. All summer long, Cal State Fullerton’s IT department has been ordering hundreds and hundreds of laptops. Last year, the school distributed 300 laptops, 235 personal hot spots, and 50 flip phones, along with webcams and headsets to students who requested them. Now, the school is using federal grants to purchase an additional 1,500 laptops and 500 personal hot spots. The devices will be ready to distributed to students in the fall, through a glass-covered pickup station in the library, ready for them to enter their student credentials and log in to the first day of school.

Back-to-School Fears

For all the confusion they experienced with distance learning in the spring, students still harbor mixed feelings about a potential return to campus. Zarate commutes to Cal State Fullerton and lives with his grandparents, whom he knows are more vulnerable to the virus. For now, on the rare occasions that he leaves the house, he reenters through the garage, changes his clothes, and uses disinfectant wipes before seeing his family. If he’s obliged to return to campus for required classes or labs, he’ll have to take extra precautions not to bring the disease home.

Esteban Richey, who will be entering his junior year at Purdue, estimates only “about 20 percent” of his peers are following physical distancing guidelines and wearing masks. Richey has asthma, an underlying health condition that may put him at greater risk should he become infected with the coronavirus. He’s choosing to take all of his classes online. The situation is imperfect: One of his graduation requirements will only be offered in-person, so Richey will be taking a partial course load and hopefully making up the class in the future.

Students who are currently quarantined in strained home environments have an uncomfortable prospect ahead of them. One University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill student who asked to remain anonymous says that while she is also fearful of students flouting physical distancing guidelines, she’s ultimately relieved that UNC will be reopening its campus with a mix of online and in-person instruction. At home, she says, she can’t get access to the mental health resources she needs. “Campus health services is also one of my reasons for wanting to return to campus. I’m unable to get the health care I’d like with privacy and support while I’m at home, including medications,” she wrote in an email. She will be moving back to the dorms in August, hoping her classmates keep their distance.

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