These scenarios omit two critical components of the campus: the many men and women who can’t work from home and extracurricular activities.
Layoffs and furloughs must be the last option; pay cuts/freezes and other cost-saving opportunities must be exhausted before even one person is laid off this fall.
Extracurricular activities must be undertaken with an abundance of caution. Only those activities that are essential and can’t take place virtually must be held. Social distancing must be practiced, no matter the health conditions that exist at the particular time.
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How the Coronavirus Will Change Faculty Life Forever
As the pandemic wears on, expect heavier teaching loads, more service requirements, and more time online
Officers, deans and advisors to the president will see their salaries cut by 10% beginning in May. Non-union employees who make more than $100,000 will see a 5% reduction in pay. Englert’s own salary, which a spokesman said was $800,000, was cut 20%.
Higher education in fall 2020: three pandemic scenarios.
As I close up my semester, I’ve had many chats with students as we think about Fall 2020 &beyond. This post by @BryanAlexander pulls together the best glimpse of what “next” may look like for us.https://t.co/Z6AZxXTJ8U
Beloit has announced that it is breaking the semester into two modules in which students take two courses each.
“The aspiration is to have a residential learning experience next year, but if COVID rages, this flexibility allows us to have it only affect half a semester, possibly,” Boynton said. “Let’s say it creeps into September, then that first module is online, but if continues to dissipate, then we’re able to bring students at this hinge point. It’s a break in the semester; it’s an obvious time to bring students into residence.”
“It also lessens the disruption in the sense of conducting four online courses at one time is a lot of pressure for faculty, and what we’re finding — and I think this is not just at Beloit but across the nation — is that juggling four online courses is a lot for students,” he said. “Limiting the online experience to two courses at a time is better for faculty and staff and student learning.”
Firstly, we need to resolve the so-called digital divide
Secondly, this will mean that teachers must reconsider all their methodologies and prepare them for this new, blended learning environment.
Thirdly, institutions, both educational and normative, must understand that, in this new context, some ways of teaching no longer make sense.
Online teaching will not consist of turning a handle while students learn on their own. On the contrary: it will require teachers to engage more than ever, who will spend many hours in forums moderating conversations and opening new threads.
Covid-19 is being described as both a crisis and an opportunity for higher education. But how “opportunity” is defined depends on where one stands in the academic hierarchy. While some hope the pandemic provides a chance to reverse troubling trends toward the adjunctification and casualization of academic labor, administrators may see it as a different sort of opportunity, to realign institutional priorities or exert greater authority over their faculties.
A statement by the Tenure for the Common Good group offers 20 recommendations for administrators, including that they “resist using the current crisis as an opportunity to exploit contingency further by hiring more contingent faculty into precarious positions.”
As faculty members are asked to take on greater teaching, advising, and administrative responsibilities, faculty development and retention “will be more important to institutional resilience — survival — than ever before,” Kiernan Mathews, executive director and principal investigator of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, wrote on Twitter.
To DePaola, the pandemic doesn’t pose new problems to academe as much as it magnifies existing ones. “Everything was held together with gum and paper clips, and coronavirus came and just sort of knocked it all down at once,” DePaola said. “I think none of the crises that this virus is causing are new. They’re just accelerated greatly. And the contradictions of the system are heightened all at once for people to see.”
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The Small World Network of College Classes: Implications for Epidemic Spread on a University Campus
Beginning in March 2020, many universities shifted to on-line instruction to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, and many now face the difficult decision of whether and how to resume in-person instruction. This article uses complete transcript data from a medium-sized residential American university to map the two-node network that connects students and classes through course enrollments. We show that the enrollment networks of the university and its liberal arts college are “small-world” networks, characterized by high clustering and short average path lengths. In both networks, at least 98% of students are in the main component, and most students can reach each other in two steps. Removing very large courses slightly elongates path lengths, but does not disconnect these networks or eliminate all alternative paths between students. Although students from different majors tend to be clustered together, gateway courses and distributional requirements create cross-major integration. We close by discussing the implications of course networks for understanding potential epidemic spread of infection on university campuses.
Qualitative researchers: Does anyone have any general pointers on conducting qualitative work in this environment other than doing interviews or focus groups over Zoom? Example: I (normally) do a lot of participant observation work. Where and how will I do this or do it as well as I have done it?
At this moment, my focus is all on teaching. But if this situation becomes more prolonged, I need to figure out how to keep the research going too.
