That can work for groups of students taking the same courses. The groups may be smaller than 30, if there are students with unusual advanced placement situations, or less common choices of electives, or if a given major is broad enough that students rarely have all of the same courses.
Of course, the groups would have to sit together in the classroom away from anyone else in the same classroom.
It really varies. My husband had a mild case - slight headaches, some nausea, a heavy feeling in his chest, loss of taste/smell and two days of low temperature, out of an illness that lasted about 6 days. I will be tested for antibodies next week, I hope. If I had it, it was even milder. I had a couple nights of chills and a slight cough. That’s it. OTOH, I had a flu shot in December, and a year long anti-tuberculosis treatment when I was in high school. It’s speculated both may contribute to a milder COVID infection.
But you’re right that it can be a really tough illness, longer than the flu and harder to treat. A woman in her 40s I know spent 12 days in bed, sick as a dog the whole time. It took her another week to get enough of her strength back so she could work (at home, she’s an attorney.) When things calm down, her doctor wants to re-examine her lungs for signs of damage, which is believed to be a little souvenir COVID can leave behind.
In other words - it CAN be a mild illness. Or it can be a bear.
@sylvan8798 Well, you might be surprised at what faculty can do. There are several issues here:
For what it’s worth, I’ve yet to talk to a faculty member who’s okay with the idea of going back to classrooms until something changes significantly with our ability to treat this disease, which I’m guessing is a long way off — we still don’t even understand where the virus goes in the body and what it does there. I’m expecting a full-court sales press about testing, but the problem is that faculty tend to be bright and able to read the medical & scientific papers, and know how statistics and protocols work, and I kinda don’t think it’ll work that well.
The people most vulnerable to being forced back are fulltime salaried staff, especially maintenance and clerical. But they’re not the ones who teach the courses, and if you want the rubber-meets-road for budget, it’s in having students and instructors in listed courses for which universities can charge tuition.
@twoinanddone – Yes, I think cohorts within cohorts based around project-based and experiential learning is an innovative way to re-think a semester and reduce a campus’ exposure. Living and learning opportunities directed by faculty? I think it’d be a very different semester but could be really meaningful.
One of the things I did was to bring both my laptop and my cellphone onto the Zoom meeting. I got a device to hold my phone above my desk, so that I could write on a large tablet and have it showing on my laptop. Best I could do for a whiteboard. The math students don’t need to look at one another for the most part, so with some practice they could switch back and forth between phones and computers and have more latitude to discuss problems.
Okay, this cohort thing…
I’m assuming you mean in a bubble? Because all that has to happen is Thursday night, and they all go out and mix with/sleep with/drink with other students, and then there’s no point in a cohort. This is exactly why profs aren’t anxious to go teach on campus.
Professors aren’t eager to be on campus because they still get paid the same amount anyway and many aren’t very interested in teaching. They were hired and promoted, usually, based on their research, and teach only as a condition of their contract with the college.
Online classes will never be as good as in-person, but they can be improved as professors gain more experience and adjust their lecture styles to be more suitable for remote learning, and the technical means to deliver the lectures improve. However, it’d also be necessary for students to adapt. Not all students will be able to make sufficient adjustments to their learning styles, unfortunately, so remote learning will always feel much inferior to some students.
Also, as @AlmostThere2018 pointed out, collaboration over a Zoom session is problematic. But that’s probably a technical issue that can be resolved and the experience improved, as another product Webex has already seemed to do better job for collaboration.
Why do you think they will have a choice? If their state opens and schools are deemed safe to open on campus, how can the faculty just say, “no, sorry, we won’t go to work until there is a vaccine”? I just don’t see it.
Okay, so let’s talk about “rigor” online.
First, this online thing isn’t new. There’s over a decade of experience with it on a mass scale, and a thing that we know about it should be unsurprising: the people who get good ed out of it are people who already have degrees and have strong motivation to finish the course with a decent grade.
These are adults. Normally they’re youngish male adults without children. They have money, they have good broadband, they have time, they’re disciplined, and they want something.
I’m impressed by what the students have been able to do this semester online — I even had a working-single-mom student who caught Covid-19 mid-course, was out of action, came back, and still got all her work in. But I think you have to be a little realistic about the fact that most kids are not ideal online students, and that their world is a mess. Many of them, even at elite schools, are poor or rural and have terrible bandwidth. I have students trying to go to school on their phones. So is this going to be as rigorous as a normal semester is, no, of course not. Are we doing more therapy and guidance than usual with the kids, yes, of course we are.
If your kid’s at a fancy school, I think what you’re going to pay for next semester is brand continuity and a bachelor’s degree in a reasonable amount of time so that the kid can move on with their life. Eventually we will lick this thing; it’s unlikely your kid will have 4 years of online from Elite Wonderland. Your kid will be maybe 21, 22, 23 at the end of this. They will manage in life regardless of whether the courses are intensely rigorous. And the elite schools that are charging you largely for a long cotillion will figure out how to move the cotillion online.
I would suggest that your kid find the opportunities here. I have a couple of students who’ve grabbed onto me like I’m a rope, because they want something — they want to go places. They ask for extra Zoom time, they email, they send me stuff to look at. I’m not of any use to them GPAwise, strategically. But they want something in life for themselves and they see that I have something like it, and they’re the kids who get my extra time. They know I’m busy, they don’t insist, but they do show up. Tell your kids to find their real teachers and follow up. Same as it ever was. I can promise you that when this is all over, the bond between a prof and the students who really emerged as the “real” students like this will last — those’ll be some well-mentored kids.
^^Professors will likely be offered the choice of teaching remotely or in-person. Some, perhaps many, students (e.g. @ChemAM on this thread) are fine with such an arrangement as long as the students can be together.
@suzyQ7 Happens all the time. There isn’t the usual boss-employee relationship between admin and faculty, even contingent (temp) faculty. If they don’t want to come back, most of them aren’t going to. They’ll be perfectly willing to go on teaching online, but if they don’t want to risk their lives to teach your kid, they probably don’t hafta.
I’m more vulnerable than most, but I still wouldn’t do it. I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t be fired for refusing to teach or work on campus, but if they decided to fire me over it, I’d shrug and move on. You can come back from unemployment. Other things, not so much.
You know it’s serious because ordinarily, faculty will show up to teach in the most seriously stupid circumstances. I’ve seen faculty so ill they actually had to sit down fast because they were passing out. Faculty will show up during blizzards. They’ll miss family events because of class schedules, leave their kids alone at home a leetle too long at night, because the one thing that is holy on campus is the scheduled class meeting. But with this thing? I’m hearing “pass”. No agonizing over it.
I agree, btw, that faculty all over will be getting much better at this fast, and that we’ll also be figuring out how to do accommodations, build cameraderie among students who’ve never met each other irl, and limit the amount of time that people are chained to the glowing rectangle. But one thing that will remain a serious impediment till it’s fixed is the state of broadband in this country. There’s a Dem initiative in the House put together by Clyburn and the rural broadband subcommittee to reserve a pile of money for national broadband improvement — immediately, hotspots and other equipment for people who don’t have access, but over a longer span, better infrastructure. Like modern infrastructure. Give your rep’s office a call and tell them you support it — I understand it’s slated for debate in the next relief bill.
This is why everyone should get their kids used to it now. Many schools are branding their masks. Could become a cool fashion statement… ?
@tuckethannock @roycroftmom I think it depends both on the school and on the individual professor; most professors at my school (Amherst College) are very eager to get back to in-person teaching.
@sylvan8798 – Yes, her prof did the same with her iPad with problems on it and the iPad was a ‘participant’ in Zoom so they could see it. The issue was when they would get into small groups to work on problems they didn’t have the ability to generate and collaborate with their OWN problems/ideas that everyone could see.
My D used WebEx in HS for some online courses through a STEM magnet and she said it’s better set up with small group collaboration tools. But I think it’s more expensive for colleges to use.
On a lighter note, my D said the prof had to figure out how to make the iPad not be one of the ‘people’ in a small breakout group, lol. It didn’t contribute much!
@tuckethannock – I said reduce exposure – not eliminate! I assume colleges will ban parties and gatherings over 20 or so. This is a big deal, of course. For larger schools, hard to enforce off campus.
The schools can ban gatherings over 20, but how will they have classes? Most of my daughter’s classes allowed 24 to register (a few were at 100 and I think one at 200). Some sorority and fraternity houses are on campus and have 50-75 living in the house and eating at the same time in the house. Choirs and orchestras have more than 50 in them.
I don’t think schools will be able to control their students. If you take away all the student activities like intramurals and movie nights and concerts and parties, you are going to have trouble with a capital T.
I was just thinking this. Most students are underage, yet there is plenty of drinking on most campuses. If they can’t stop that, how are they going to stop them just hanging out in groups? They’re just going to do it anyway allowed or not.
@cshell2 Because most colleges don’t really care about underage drinking. They have policies to make it clear they are complying with federal law but they are never enforced. It’s not a matter of whether they can stop it (because they can), it’s about whether they care enough to stop it.