My primary concern is whether the professors are being discouraged or outright prohibited from providing alternatives such as recording lectures or setting up a zoom link. I’m hoping the omicron wave comes and goes quickly and this issue with it. I’m disappointed that the admin doesn’t appear to be open to allowing some creativity by the professors in addressing this. It’s more of an all or nothing approach.
There’s a petition circulating among Vandy graduate students requesting remote options be made available. Many Schools spent all of last year and part of this year acting very afraid of the virus and cases on campus. Some kids can’t pivot that quickly from “it’s a huge problem” to “it’s no big deal”.
I completely understand. Not offering SOME option to students who can’t attend class (and based on the numbers that’s probably a pretty decent number) is unreasonable. Missing a week of class in my daughter’s major would be extremely hard to recover from if the professors weren’t accommodating.
Even discussion-heavy classes have lecture components, which can be recorded. For example, one of the classes my S took require students to watch recorded lecture video before each class. The class itself is then all discussion of the materials the students have already watched.
My observation is that some of the best professors actually prefer to have their lecture materials widely distributed. They all have deep passions and want to advocate for their fields.
I can’t even imagine what kind of catch-22 policy construction would lead to that as an outcome. I can say that here, the situation’s such a mess that we have a bank of official policies, a layer of dept-chair nodding and winking, and then people doing more or less whatever they can get away with in terms of trying to keep themselves and others safe while making education and research happen. Including a lot of lecture-recording. Which is awful for the students, who have no idea what’s happening tomorrow. Our case-reporting numbers also increasingly make no sense when compared with whatever they were the day before.
Maybe this is what “the system was overwhelmed” looks like?
If I were the parent of a Vandy student in that situation I’d probably be sending a lawyer letter and pulling every press string I could, but not expecting much beyond an offer to refund the semester and take a gap, then having to decide whether there was any point in suing for real. That’s just terrible. And I’m really not a fan of hybrid teaching, which comes with a whole nest of other accommodation, tech, workload, and equity problems, but I do understand needs must and being willing to let the willing work. (I say that, of course, having done my best to help a kid who got abandoned when his indep-study instructor quit – forced out by zero covid accommodations for immunocompromised family at home – and gotten stymied by admin, who wouldn’t allow a registration construction that’d allow the kid to take the course with the hours he needed and me to get paid at least something for teaching it. I’d almost forgotten already.)
At some point we’re going to have to stop ad-hoccing it. This virus is going to be a while stabilizing, we’re likely going to have wave after wave of successful variant, we’d had a massive push on for remote ed nationally anyway, and either we’ll have to get a bit graceful about going back and forth, in-person/remote, or nonprofit universities will have to get help in doing remote for real – and building it in a way that’s not just about 18-22, but about national needs for continuing ed. The profs are generally good at teaching – some very good – and at this point highly adaptable, but admin has to stop running around headless and develop some actual strategy.
Maybe some discussion based classes have lecture components but not all. Our D’s freshman Sem did not. The kids read their assignments and the professor led a discussion or many times assigned a student to lead it while he also contributed. Same with a religion class that S19 just took.
I know there are profs who don’t want their lectures/slides/class materials recorded because it’s confidential/protected/copyrighted work product that they don’t want widely distributed.
Recording does raise a number of issues, and there’s a lot out there about this, here’s a few articles:
Online education has been growing well before the pandemic as you say. There are large successful models in this space that represent the best demonstrated practice modality in delivery of online education (Western Governor’s, SNHU, ASU, Liberty to name the largest in terms of students).
Colleges that want to remain residential can do so and there will always be students interested in that. Those colleges that want to expand their remote offerings will find quite a number of formidable competitors. It’s going to be an uphill battle for an average directional university to shift strategies and keep students/customers. Being stuck in the middle (not quite residential with in person classes, or if online only, not as inexpensive as the online education leaders) may not be a good place to be. Time will tell.
I am always amazed at the blatant hypocrisy that we see when it comes to high level athletics at the D1 level versus the primary mission of our colleges and universities when the policies enacted do not align. I just laugh that we can have indoor athletic contests with thousands of spectators, but then must have remote classes for a few weeks to protect the student body.
I couldn’t agree more…if it’s safe for students/staff/faculty to go to an indoor basketball game, it’s safe to go to class. This was happening at Duke (I think they have started in person class now) as well as Georgetown (remote all month) and Vandy (start in-person this Monday). I’m sure there are more examples.
I read recently on another parent forum where this was discussed and a parent managed to speak to the Dean of Public Health and got some clarity. I can’t find the post but basically the gist was the decisions are being made by organization like Pac 12 or the like, as a separate entity from the school and their rules may not be in line with the University.
Barnard’s first week of Spring Semester produced a modest 1.12% positivity rate from 2,010 tests conducted up to 23 January. That’s down from 1.82% the week before, and from 2.69% positives of 4,381 tests conducted in the week ending 19 December.
This week will be the final of two weeks of online classes, next week is in-person again.
With everyone (eligible) having to be boostered, my daughter noticed less intensity when students test positive now: There’ll be an email notice that someone in class had tested positive, but since no one knows who sat how close to whom, and boostered asymptomatic contacts don’t need to isolate, it’s now left up to the individual to watch themselves for symptoms.
In-door dining and social gatherings will be reviewed, depending on how the positivity rate trends.
The day I had dropped her off, mask-wearing was predominant in the neighborhood. The restaurant hostess still asked for the vaccination card to be “flashed” before seating us (although an Alaskan driver’s license might have sufficed )
I was about to send a tart reply to one of my chairs’ weak-kneed covid-practices emails…come to find out that she and her family are home sick with covid.
Which isn’t all that surprising if you put on your good-soldier hat and go to work on a campus teeming with omicron and no vax or mask rules in January, and have kids in schools teeming with covid, schools that have mask rules that have to be relaxed at lunchtime…
Gonna be interesting to see what happens with university health insurance coverage and premiums after this. Our insurance is tailor-made as a benefit to go with our teaching hospital, but it’s necessary to keep premiums low because the pay’s so miserable here and it’s not a part of the country with much attraction if you haven’t got family here. People stay specifically for the insurance. I’ll be interested to see whether BCBS does some pushback on that as the acute/lingering bills roll in for employees.
bennty - maybe you could send off a sweet reply asking if she or her family need any help? a Homemade dinner, picking up tylenol? I bet it would be appreciated.
This is someone whose attention to her own career over students’ ended in students falling between the cracks last semester as they tried to adapt to the chaos created by covid policies here, and who did her best to force me into a covid-rich classroom; she’s also trying to force my boss to cut pay for our adjuncts to something approximating nonexistent. She’s highly compensated and I’m sure she can find instacart if she needs anything dropped off for her.
Many large organizations are self-insured, but use an insurance company to manage claims and deal with in versus out of network etc… If that is true for the university, it is likely that any extra costs will be directly seen as part of the passed through bills that BCBS sends to the university.
Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. The problem is the U doesn’t have the money to absorb this at any scale, and if they hike premiums, they can trigger significant resignations. They’re competing with marketplace insurance, which isn’t as good, but make the premium/oop difference small enough, and the specific coverages become less important to most people. Neither salaries nor environment are enough to keep people anymore, and inflation isn’t helping there. Not sure where/how they’re going to hide that cost bump. There’s a pot of money that could be available, but it’s the equivalent of eating seed.
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