I’m so happy. I just checked the course listings for my sons classes and they are all scheduled to be in-person and have all been relocated to larger rooms. I have been periodically checking and up until now they have just said TBA. Finally there are classrooms listed. Four of his classes are 100 person lecture style classes and they have all been moved to one of the large 300 person lecture halls on campus. One class is smaller and has also been moved though I’m not familiar with the location, I’m assuming it’s the same type of spreading out. My son does so much better with in person classes, even if it’s just listening to a lecture.
My son has all in-person classes as well. Most students at his school are not as lucky. He also does much, much better with in-person classes, so I am very happy about this.
Harvard did have very specific guidance for its faculty regarding how much teaching time has to be live and available to students in different time zones. The Crimson has details.
Am I missing something? I thought by its very nature, a class that is described as “hybrid” is meant to be taught both in-person and online. Going completely online at mid-semester shouldn’t be that big a deal. My hunch is that very few classes will be purely in-person in the Fall, maybe the same caveats for STEM labs, etc. that I’ve read on other posts.
@roycroftmom i agree that many students, whether at home or away, will not socially distance.
The difference for some families here is finances.
College campuses are going to go to online classes because COVID will be on campus from day one. It’s not if, it’s when.
For many the cost of having a student sit in a dorm to the tune of thousands of dollars is just not acceptable, especially with some schools actually raising costs.
How can a class even be hybrid? In person classes are taught one way and the best remote classes are completely different. They aren’t just recorded lectures and online tests. There’s best practice pedagogy for remote classes that’s very different than what one would use for an in-person class.
DD just told me that Atlanta public schools will open two weeks late and the first 9 weeks will be virtual only. Wondering if her private school will follow that and change their plans to be entirely in-person. ( Her school is reducing the number of students per class from 18-20 to 12-14, so teachers are being required to teach 5 sections instead of 4, for no additional salary.)
Will Georgia Tech or Emory make corresponding changes? GT already backtracked on their initial plan to recommend but not require students to wear masks in class.
Private high schools have a much easier time and greater incentives to staying open. Smaller classes, far more space, more resources, no buses. Kids will be more compliant with rules or asked to leave.
@homerdog asked:
Wesleyan thinks they can be:
https://www.wesleyan.edu/cpi/idd/course-design/blended.html
A classroom taught college course has a standard definition, with credit hours as the measure. A 3 credit course willl physically meet 3 times a week for an hour, twice a week for an hour and a half, or once a week for 3 hours. The issue I see is there are no standard definitions for hybrid or remote courses. How many reading or video viewing assignments equal a traditional hour of instruction? Are professors required to hold regular office hours? Given the COVID-19 situation, do students have recourse if Prof. Z cancels Zoom meetings every time his young kids are home making noise?
Right. That is just adding some online parts to an in-person class. It’s not switching up the entire pedagogy. Here’s a link from Harvard. So many things to consider when teaching remotely. Everything from closed captioning to how to distribute and pace your lectures, how to engage the students (which is completely different in a remote format).
https://teachremotely.harvard.edu/best-practices
Adding:
On the Wesleyan link, they write this about online courses
“We use various design techniques and accepted standards to guide instructors through the process ensuring instructor and student satisfaction.”
That’s it. No more detail. Compare that to Harvard’s directions and you can see that Harvard’s professors are being given a lot of detailed direction for setting up remote learning.
I would hope that a college course is about mastery of a subject rather than attendance in class. The syllabus would not change, presumably, and the professor will do what is required to get thru it
My niece goes to a LAC and just found out her Stem labs are online, but the corresponding lectures are in person. This is the reverse of what many were assuming - that labs would definitely be in person.
There are those if us that have believed this since April…
when it started to become clear that there would be no national coordinated pandemic response plan and it was every state for itself trying to secure resources, people way smarter than me tried to quantify the cost and did the ‘ what if we nationalized companies to produce tests’ analysis…looking at what it would take if we were testing sufficiently weekly to get everyone back to work and school. I heard an estimate of a trillion dollars which seems far cheaper than the cost of keeping the country’s economy on the back burner until a vaccine. Surely those in power will look at the financial cost of a lack of national plan, right?
@homerdog wrote:
From what I’ve heard, Harvard professors can use all the pedagogical help they can get…
One can “get through a syllabus” by assigning students to learn it on their own. If that will be the method used, then we should be informed.
Sorry, but first you are saying that colleges need a plan of action. Then you are saying once they have the plan of action (having both possibilities of teaching), that is is alot of extra work. YES!!! It is. Imagine what they are going through at a moments notice they have to flip a switch and have a new plan of action. It won’t be that different next year either. Hybrid learning is here to stay for awhile. Complete industries are changing like overnight and education will be no different. What you think was normal last year most likely won’t come back 100%. I personally think some of this is for the better.
Schools/ Lacs like Beloit College had/have a plan that many Lacs were looking at as an outline roadmap. Why did this Lac come up with an interesting 5 point plan and other have not?
Not really. You need to start looking up what a hybrid education is at various schools. It might not be what you “think” it is. Again, not every college will have the same examples or definitions but I have done way too many zoom like lectures as the presenter and student per se to know. They can actually be the same. Yes, with in-depth discussion. Sometimes even better discussion since people feel more relaxed.
@Knowsstuff what I am saying is that, if faculty only have to plan for one kind of teaching scenario, then they will have more time to get it right. Planning a remote class is rethinking every single part of the original in-person class.
No one seems to be understanding that remote classes, done right, are a completely different animal than teaching in person. You don’t just record your lecture, have in person discussion groups online. There is way more to it than that.
I am totally opposed to the “online” lab concepts. One of my courses has a lab component and we are currently supposed to figure out what we want to do for it, with the assumption that in-person is vastly preferable. I intend to do everything in my power to have in-person labs and get whatever (diminished) value we can from them. We’re cheating the students as it is, since the allotted lab time has to be divided up to accommodate the distancing restrictions. The lectures have to be online due to lack of lecture hall space.