Melvin No delays from a Broad Institute participating institution from one of my kids on campus.
@NJSue I think temporarily shifting instruction online could act as a wake-up call to students. Although the situation at Notre Dame is still pretty bad, it has definitely improved since they temporarily shifted all online. D has a friend at Notre Dame who reports that students are now taking COVID much more seriously.
Because many students moving into the dorms are doing so because they had f2f classes. If they were not f2f they may have stayed home. The delay and promise to go back is to get them out of any cancellation period on the dorm and once they have them long enough by coincidence the classes will all go online.
@melvin123 So far, so good at Amherst. D got her first test results just under 24 hours after the test and got her second test results about 12 hours after the test.
D at Yale got hers back in less than 24 hours from Broad, but she is grad student and undergrads don’t show up until tomorrow so that will be the test. She is excited to be out of quarantine on Monday (from hot state).
Meant to say the Initial test result was received after 20 hours from a Broad Institute participating college.
Instruction and learning should not be tied to out-of-classroom campus behavioral discipline. It is professionally unethical to use classroom delivery practice as a “threat” or “carrot” for non-academic behavior that has nothing to do with it. This is why I strongly believe that instruction should have been unyoked this fall from other considerations of campus life from the start. Faculty don’t want their classes to be used as a cynical behavior control strategy. It poisons the interactions with students.
That is impressive turnaround time. Am guessing that her test must have been shortly before FedEx pick up time. I wonder if the lab is running all night.
There are colleges out there that decided on remote class only. Bowdoin’s only in-person classes will be freshmen seminars this fall. They announced back in June that this spring’s classes will also be remote whether they decide to have kids on campus or not. In that case, instruction was “unyoked” from campus life. So there is zero expectation of going to class and there will be no going back and forth between different options.
Even some larger schools (UIUC for one) decided ahead of time to have almost all classes remote. I believe they are starting with over 75% of classes only remote.
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How is Broad Institute doing with its 24 hour turnaround guaranty, anyone know?
I work at a college that uses Broad. I got tested on Friday morning around 11:30. Results back by 11:30 that night, so 12 hour turnaround. We only had freshman on campus at that point, I’m sure 12 hours turn around won’t continue. But I was impressed.
@homerdog I think that was the correct strategy.
Suspending in-person classes to manipulate behavior as opposed to responding to a public health crisis is wrong IMHO.
I also believe that even if 75% of students on campus obey the rules, it doesn’t matter because the 25% percent that won’t or can’t will determine the outcome of the campus life experiment during a pandemic. Online classes aren’t a punishment, they are a response to reality.
Sorry. I was answering The question about Broad. Didn’t quite do the quote correctly.
@Peach94 – Is your school within courier distance of Cambridge? I assume the lab is there, but perhaps they have located it elsewhere?
@CT1417 We are driving distance and have shuttles twice a day that take the tests. I probably hit the timing perfectly. But I was shocked to get the results back so fast.
@Peach94 – That makes sense!
I feel the same way when I have blood work at a blood draw station affiliated with the hospital ten miles away. How did they do that???
@NJSue Do we think it’s that deliberate - colleges withholding in person class if kids misbehave? That’s how it’s come down but I don’t think that is the way it was planned by the colleges. Some tried in-person classes. They (for some reason) believed they could stave off the virus with their testing plan. It didn’t work. They want to keep kids on campus and see if they can somehow re-start the clock by going to remote class for a few weeks. I guess, if cases level off or decrease, they will try in-person classes again and hope kids get it this time that they need to follow the rules.
I don’t understand why a school like ND thought their plan would would but I also don’t think they were trying to fool the kids into coming back. What should happen now, if any college decides to empty the dorms, they should refund room and board because it’s the testing plan that failed the kids.
My son just finished his first week of online classes. It’s going better than last year but he still doesn’t like it. Profs seem much more organized and all his classes are synchronous zoom at the moment. The lectures are also recorded for playback later which was good because of the one glitch he ran into. At 11am Wednesday morning, either the university website crashed or just had too much traffic to handle, but bottom line is that he was kicked out of his student portal and couldn’t log back in. I guess you go through the student portal to get to your classes. He was sending me screenshots of error messages. But then, as soon as the class was over he was sent a link to watch the lecture, and then he could log into his portal again. I hope this doesn’t turn into an ongoing problem.
As for Covid cases, the school hasn’t published anything since last Monday. I have no idea how much testing they are doing and how many positives there are. I have heard no chatter about students being positive or quarantined so the numbers must be small or it would be blowing up. My son says he hasn’t heard anything either. I have checked the numbers for the county the school is located in and they’ve actually been dropping since students have started arriving.
I’m not so sure that is necessarily the intent of all of these institutions - to be a “punishment”. Maybe for some.
Similar to how states/counties etc are having to adjust their re-opening elements – its not a punishment per se though the effects may feel that way.
Likely a resource issue for all these larger schools, but I don’t see how they thought they could contain anything without testing students prior to allowing them on campus (ECU, NC State) and others)
I get what @NJres is saying though. People here were saying that behavior has improved in response to the temporary moving of classes to online. So it appears to have de facto manipulated their behavior. But then, if classes come back to f2f, what happens if behavior slips again, especially with colder weather coming? If numbers go back up, then schools would need to shift again! So rather that, call it one and done, and stay on remote. Try again next semester.
It shouldn’t be tied to student behavior (especially when it may well be a minority of students causing the issues), but reality forges the connection, no matter what we would prefer.