Closing Campuses

My district requires the online learning for middle school and high schoolers at least (I have one of each). They offered loaner Chromebooks which would be adequate for eLearning. Most kids here have access to a computer and a smartphone, the few that don't can get a Chromebook loaner. Internet access at home could be a challenge for poor folks and the district would handle those cases case by case. There may be a special fund to supply MiFi hotspots or the like as needed.

ThreeJsDad said:

In many cases the people out shopping are those we have closed down the schools to protect. I am not talking about grocery stores or pharmacies, they are getting stuff for their gardens, and around the house projects.

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Just to be clear - states did not close schools to protect the kids.
With Covid-19, kids are the least adversely affected segment of the population. We closed the schools to slow-down the spread of the virus in high-density social settings, like schools, work-places, movie theaters, etc.

Our school district had shut down the school ahead of the state, the day after next-door town's parent was diagnosed with Covid-19. The assumption was that the kids will have picked it up and were going to spread it to other kids through social interactions. And then those kids would bring it home to the more vulnerable parents / grandparents.

ThreeJsDad said:

These folks at high risk are basically doing just that. Some of them may end up earning the Darwin Award they deserve.

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That award is presently reserved for our federal-level politicians, virtually all of whom are in the high-risk age group.
Kids will be, mostly, fine. Which is a sort of a blessing in this situation.

James Duffy said:

How can the districts make on-line lessons mandatory? Many poorer students simply do not have internet access and internet-capable devices away from home[...]

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Internet access is not a luxury in the US, not anymore. It may not be always high-speed (100+Megs each way), but it is pretty ubiquitous nonetheless.
We are up to 293M internet users in the US (as of 2018) out of 330M total population, and that 330M includes infants.
87.3% covered is pretty good:
https://www.statista.com/topics/2237/internet-usage-in-the-united-states/

Now, not every kid has their personal laptop/iPad/cell phone.
To cover that gap, our elementary school had issued an iPad to every 3rd-6th grader (probably similar for middle/high schools, but my kids are in elementary school).
The regularly scheduled video-chat class participation is optional, but assignments submission is mandatory. And grades reflect the timeliness and quality of homework submissions.

I'm not sure why they skipped 1st and 2nd graders. Maybe for budget reasons, or maybe because those age-group classes are too unstructured.

James Duffy said:

How can the districts make on-line lessons mandatory? Many poorer students simply do not have internet access and internet-capable devices away from home, and traditional alternate points of access (libraries, youth centers, shopping centers, churches, community centers) are currently shut down. For many kids, academic learning simply doesn't take place unless the school is open. We could change that as a society, but seem to lack the cojones to make it a priority.

We all run around with ubiquitous internet access 24/7 in our pockets, but that degree of technological equity simply isn't available across all demographics.

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Parents can take some responsibility here, especially those who can't work and are stuck at home with their kids. Set up a schedule Monday thru Friday to go over lessons in the text books you have. Read a book with a kid, watch some history documentaries together, have your kid write an essay about SOMETHING and review and grade it. We are always handing over responsibility to the government for education, healthcare, welfare, etc., we forget that WE can be an example to our kids on how to be independent self-starters. Yeah, your kids are stuck at home. If all they do is play video games and watch inane online videos, that's because YOU let them. BE a parent. They say when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. This is a horrible crisis, but as horrible as it is, there are opportunities to go through this WITH your kids and build stronger relationships. Why do we say "academic learning simply doesn't take place unless the school is open". Some of the best learning is NOT in school.

cwbullet said:

I think this infection might change our society. I think our education system is one piece. It was already shifting to more online but I think this will push if further faster. I think it will further conferences and large scale meetings. I think it will increase the move to telework and telemedicine. It is common in DC and large cities. I think all will be good changes.

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At least in my field, I don't envision my customers going back to the way it was. I see a the shift to telecommuting / remote work as becoming the new normal or even more normal that it was.

ChicagoDave said:

At least in my field, I don't envision my customers going back to the way it was. I see a the shift to telecommuting / remote work as becoming the new normal or even more normal that it was.

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I 100% agree. I think medicine will be transformed.

cwbullet said:

I think this infection might change our society. I think our education system is one piece. It was already shifting to more online but I think this will push if further faster. I think it will further conferences and large scale meetings. I think it will increase the move to telework and telemedicine. It is common in DC and large cities. I think all will be good changes.

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Kaiser has been moving toward telemedicine for a year or two now. Guessing they believe it provides an economical alternative to everyone visiting the clinic for minor issues that can be easily diagnosed over the phone. Video is also being used in some cases (patient has computer and vidcam).

I’m okay with this. It’s often a convenience to not spend an hour or more getting to or from a 10 minute visit in the doctor’s office.

Marc_G said:

My district requires the online learning for middle school and high schoolers at least (I have one of each). They offered loaner Chromebooks which would be adequate for eLearning. Most kids here have access to a computer and a smartphone, the few that don't can get a Chromebook loaner. Internet access at home could be a challenge for poor folks and the district would handle those cases case by case. There may be a special fund to supply MiFi hotspots or the like as needed.

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Even our elementary kids were given tablets so they could do the on-line lessons. In the very few cases (10 kids out of the whole school) who do not have internet access accommodations are being made. Spectrum even set up free internet for families they cold service. The teachers at my wife's school have done some really cool stuff for the kids and seriously stepped up to help the kids continue to learn and reduce the stress.

BABAR said:

Parents can take some responsibility here

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In a perfect world, yes. Unfortunately, there are many parents who have no idea to lead academic learning in the home, usually because it was never modeled for them when they were children. Add that to the fact that many parents are being forced to leave children home alone, and you have a supremely challenging learning situation. (And that's ignoring the obvious safety issues!)

In short, just because something is a good idea does not mean that lower income families have the tools, resources, flexibility, or talent to make at-home learning a priority right now. The truly sad thing is that this current crisis will further cause the gap between the haves and the have-nots to grow even wider.

The NY Times had a great opinion piece on the inequities in digital learning being exposed by the COVID-19 crisis.

Some additional background: I spent the bulk of my career at Apple leading teams that sold technology to schools, both K12 and HiEd. I'm hearing from my former colleagues that this crisis has ignited a round of panic buying within the K12 community as they scramble to meet the demands for the tools to deliver curriculum remotely. I have friends at Google who started the EDU Chromebook initiatives there years ago, and they are seeing the same behavior. The #1 problem they are addressing with schools is the fact that (wait for it!) not everyone has internet access at home. You can place a device in a student's hands, but the device will not allow access to the same tools, curriculum, and experience that other students may be enjoying at their homes.

HiEd is a bit different. Public HiEd institutions have been delivering courses remotely for years, so the new reality is just a matter of increased scale for them. Counterintuitively, wealthier private universities are in a different situation, as the personalized, face-to-face approach has long been part of their overall value proposition. They're all scrambling right now to adjust to this new online, remote reality.

One more thing to consider about HiEd: both public and private institutions have shifted an inordinate burden of teaching onto the shoulders of low-paid associate faculty in recent years. Many of these are contract-based, part-time employees who lack many of the benefits extended to full-time staff. Chief among these benefits is access to things as simple as internet access, which further compounds the problems.

Some forms of remote learning work well. The edX program has been doing a fantastic job but it is far better now then when it started 5-6 years ago. School districts trying to do this on their own “from scratch” are at a huge disadvantage.

What amuses me is the thought of expensive universities trying to justify their high tuition after this is over.

BBowmaster said:

Some forms of remote learning work well. The edX program has been doing a fantastic job but it is far better now then when it started 5-6 years ago. School districts trying to do this on their own “from scratch” are at a huge disadvantage.

What amuses me is the thought of expensive universities trying to justify their high tuition after this is over.

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My MBA program at Auburn was 100% remote back in 1999(!). Now doing a Master's in Quantitative Psychology with post-baccularate courses at UC Berkeley and then at Ball State to finish up, again 100% remote.

James Duffy said:

HiEd is a bit different. Public HiEd institutions have been delivering courses remotely for years, so the new reality is just a matter of increased scale for them. Counterintuitively, wealthier private universities are in a different situation, as the personalized, face-to-face approach has long been part of their overall value proposition. They're all scrambling right now to adjust to this new online, remote reality.

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Except of course that our online and hybrid students were self-selected. They were comfortable with the idea (if not competent in the execution) of an online class. And the DFW rate has always been higher for hybrid and fully online than for entirely face-to-face classes. Disproportionately, it is inflated by the "withdraw" part of DFW as students figure out that an online class is more work than a face-to-face class.

And there also things that we just cannot do remotely. Labs and practica have to be converted into something very different.

Even students who have internet access at home may not be able to connect with anything but a phone or a tablet. Some will not be able to see the online quizzes, or the Sapling or Mastering homework sets -- and even if they can, they will be using that same small screen to access the eText from which they are to study for those quizzes and HW sets.

James Duffy said:

One more thing to consider about HiEd: both public and private institutions have shifted an inordinate burden of teaching onto the shoulders of low-paid associate faculty in recent years. Many of these are contract-based, part-time employees who lack many of the benefits extended to full-time staff. Chief among these benefits is access to things as simple as internet access, which further compounds the problems.

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Hear hear! Teaching on-line is a lot more work than teaching face to face, and instructors are rarely compensated for the time and effort required to learn a particular Learning Management System or develop online content. Nor, as you say, have instructors typically been provided with up-to-spec computers to take home, or compensated for broadband subscriptions.

And it is not just adjuncts and contingent instructors; schools do not typically pay tenure-track instructors to maintain high speed at-home internet access (although the adjuncts are more likely to have to choose between paying for FiOS and paying for food). Many instructors avoid teaching online and hybrid courses when they have the choice.

Even those of us with experience teaching online are facing a different set of challenges with remote teaching. We expect our online students to have access to resources on campus, even if they never use them. Not many of us have white boards or document cameras set up in our homes. Lecturing over Zoom from a dining table is going to require some creativity and not inconsiderable effort for instructors accustomed to working example problems on the board. Even the PowerPoint rangers are going to have to learn how to screencast.

The text book publishers are treating this like a gold rush. My inbox is filled with marketing for "turn key" remote teaching solutions. Even if I was inclined to use any of this (and I am not), I wouldn't have time to evaluate the different flavors of each offering from different vendors.

This is a huge and poorly controlled experiment and there are going to be spectacular failures.

cwbullet said:

College and high school educations may never be the same again.

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My 7 y/o niece in first grade is doing her studies online... her 5 y/o TK sister got workbooks to take home. It's not just HS and college...

cerving said:

My 7 y/o niece in first grade is doing her studies online... her 5 y/o TK sister got workbooks to take home. It's not just HS and college...

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I agree. I am not sure how large the long term impact will be on elementary and middle schools. Parents use the school as a means to "babysit". It allows them to work. Most high school age can self watch.

The longer this continues, the large the change on all of the education system.

cwbullet said:

I agree. I am not sure how large the long term impact will be on elementary and middle schools. Parents use the school as a means to "babysit". It allows them to work. Most high school age can self watch.

The longer this continues, the large the change on all of the education system.

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My wife has parents that are attacking her because they are being forced to take care of their kids and teach them through the lessons she is providing. Maybe the parents will have a little more respect for their "baby sitters" when this is all done.

I have been taking classes online to finish my degree and prepare to move into another aspect of medicine for when my body can't keep up with EMS. I had 2 A&P classes which would have been incredibly difficult had I not already had a good background in the subject. The "instructors" merely allowed the course to go on autopilot through McGraw-Hill Connect and provided no insight whatsoever. One even failed to return grades on lab reports and other projects until after midterms were over. I hope other institutions have better oversight, but my experience is that the instructors expect students to put in more work for online education, but they just want to sign off on whatever platform the course uses and collect a paycheck.

I also recently took an online FP-C refresher as part of the required CEUs to maintain that certification. This course was the same conference I have attended in person and a well done online course. Even then, the face-to-face instruction was better for me.

Most of the additional certifications I have to maintain for work have moved online. All of the American Heart Association courses like ACLS and PALS have online review, gamified case studies, and once that is complete, you meet in a small group to run a mega code and prove your skills. NRP was the same way, but the group component with the instructors was a good learning experience.

ThreeJsDad said:

My wife has parents that are attacking her because they are being forced to take care of their kids and teach them through the lessons she is providing. Maybe the parents will have a little more respect for their "baby sitters" when this is all done.

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I’m far more worried about the kids that enjoyed the escape and safety that school provided. To many families don’t want to have to spend time with their kids and many children understand the abuse this will bring. Kids that have to deal with easily frustrated parents without inflaming them into abuse are now forced to double the FaceTime with their abusers.

NateB said:

but my experience is that the instructors expect students to put in more work for online education, but they just want to sign off on whatever platform the course uses and collect a paycheck.

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More work for the online classes is the nature for online classes. Lectures, labs, and recitations are all much higher bandwidth than anything we can do through a screen. Making up the difference is a lot of work for both the instructor and the student.

As for you suspicions about your instructors, we don't always have as much latitude as we want. The choice to use a canned curriculum from a publisher isn't always up to the instructor, and being slow to return scored assignments is sometimes a symptom of trying to manage more than a full-time teaching load -- often spread across multiple institutions -- trying to make rent.

For decades the trend in higher education (in the US) has been to hire more part-time instructors, and to hire more full time administrators. Administration now accounts for most of the people employed in the education sector. The disparity between the pay for instructors and the pay for deans, chancellors, vice presidents mirrors the widening separation between compensation rates for executives and workers in the private sector. In fact, this is often used to justify paying a VP 3 or 10 times what an instructor can earn' "We have to stay competitive with the private sector to attract the best people..."

I have colleagues who teach 4 classes a term, and work gig jobs on the side, and do not qualify for health insurance or retirement benefits.

There is whole other thing going on with tenure-track instructors, where teaching is not weighed as heavily as publication rate, committee work, or success at securing grant money, when being evaluated for advancement.

@jlabrasca - I get that with some instructors. The one for my A&P classes doesn't show up for her in-person sections either. The fact that she is still employed makes me think twice about continuing at this school.

Edit: The school is public community college. I doubt there is many concerned about anything except paying bills and getting a job at a better school. The "education" or at least the credits are free to me as a benefit from my employer. If I were footing the bill, I'd have been somewhere else a long time ago.

NateB said:

I doubt there is many concerned about anything except paying bills and getting a job at a better school.

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.

To be sure I I know some lazy instructors. And I've known some cyclical burnouts, coasting towards retirement. I know a lot more instructors who are honestly doing the best they can with limited resources and too little time.

And the job can get to be pretty miserable. Dealing with entitled, distracted, and grade-conscious students who think that your class is just some kind of hazing ritual to be endured before entering the "real world" is less fun that you might imagine.

Social media is a nightmare for continent instructors. A disgruntled student can sink a class by posting a denunciation on the right platform. If students read that an instructor is "unfair" or "too hard" they will not register for the class. Classes that don't fill don't run. and adjuncts only get paid when they teach. There is, therefore a strong incentive to teach down to the least capable, least interested, student in the class.

It breaks my heart when administrative nonsense and the complaints of the larger number of "Just tell me what I have to do to get a really high grade" students prevents me from delivering the instruction that my interested and curious students deserve.

Among faculty right now, the gnawing worry is that this response to the current crisis will encourage schools to move more classes online permanently. It is much more cost effective for the school, even as it is much more labor intensive for both the student and the instructor, and much less effective for delivering instruction.

I'm the associate dean of the graduate school at a land-grant university...fortunately we are able to have most of the MS and PhD defenses via Zoom or WebEx. Unfortunately, nearly all research has been halted, so the academic progress of our graduate students has been seriously delayed.

As for the COVID response for the rest of my university....We extended our spring break by an extra week and then took all classes online for the rest of the semester. Most of the dorms have been closed, though students aren't yet allowed back on campus to pick up their belongings. We're scrambling to find creative ways to deliver laboratory curricula online (nearly impossible). The first summer session is also going to be online. Commencement has been postponed until the fall. Everyone is nervous about enrollment numbers and the budget for next year.

P.S. I am one of the administrators that @jlabrasca is referring to, and I agree 100% with his assessment. The current crisis is amplifying the online-ification of higher ed, and it will lead to a gig academy, where very few professors have permanent positions. You can imagine a future where the children of the 1% will get in-person education, taught by experts, extensive laboratory experiences, and the all-important recommendation letters. The 99% will get online "certifications."