Covid-19 Response: Evidence of How Higher Ed Can Be Completely Restructured?

[Caracal]

The American Chemical Society is still on record as physical labs being necessary for educating chemists and other chemical professions.

In general this whole discussion reminds me of the first ten years of the internet when there were all these breathless predictions about how soon nobody would leave the house. Of course, it turned out that people do like to leave their house and successful companies on the internet needed to be offering a thing people would find easier and more pleasant. Online dating was a success because the systems it replaced involved people going to places they didn't want to go in the hopes they might meet someone else who happened to be there. The sales pitch was basically "hey, you know this awkward horrible thing you hate, but is necessary?" What if you could just do it while you sat at home instead, and at least when people were gross and unappealing you wouldn't have to physically walk away from them?

We've been ordering groceries and picking them up outside the store, but I have no desire to continue doing it after things settle down. It isn't a convenience for me, it's the opposite. Same with lots of things involved in this. Everyone isn't going to switch to online classes or canned online labs because those things are actually crummier and don't provide the same benefits.

[Caracal]

[

I can get my heartrate and BP checked in the drugstore for free. I can go to a lab for tests and the results are sent to my doctor electronically. There are getting to be more and more things that can be done without me physically going to the office.

Sure, and that might be fine for your yearly appointment, or a follow up visit about your blood pressure or cholesterol, but it isn't going to be super useful if you think you have an ear infection.

[marshwiggle]

I can get my heartrate and BP checked in the drugstore for free. I can go to a lab for tests and the results are sent to my doctor electronically. There are getting to be more and more things that can be done without me physically going to the office.

Sure, and that might be fine for your yearly appointment, or a follow up visit about your blood pressure or cholesterol, but it isn't going to be super useful if you think you have an ear infection.

Of course, but it doesn't have to be.

In general this whole discussion reminds me of the first ten years of the internet when there were all these breathless predictions about how soon nobody would leave the house. Of course, it turned out that people do like to leave their house and successful companies on the internet needed to be offering a thing people would find easier and more pleasant. Online dating was a success because the systems it replaced involved people going to places they didn't want to go in the hopes they might meet someone else who happened to be there. The sales pitch was basically "hey, you know this awkward horrible thing you hate, but is necessary?" What if you could just do it while you sat at home instead, and at least when people were gross and unappealing you wouldn't have to physically walk away from them?

I can't remember  the source, but the statistic I heard a few years ago was that now about 25% of couples meet online. It doesn't have to be close to 100% to be very disruptive.

We've been ordering groceries and picking them up outside the store, but I have no desire to continue doing it after things settle down. It isn't a convenience for me, it's the opposite. Same with lots of things involved in this. Everyone isn't going to switch to online classes or canned online labs because those things are actually crummier and don't provide the same benefits.

I don't do curbside pickup for groceries, (I have once or twice), but having done it for some things like hardware I realized I might do it in some cases later. As above, even if these novel processes account for 10 or 20% of the market going forward that's a very big change from before.  In the discussions on here about institutions closing, one of the risk factors is places that haven't established their own niche.

Airbnb hasn't eliminated hotels or apartments, but it's profoundly changed the market for medium term rentals.

[polly_mer]

The American Chemical Society is still on record as physical labs being necessary for educating chemists and other chemical professions.

Do they have anything to say about things like chemistry minors, specifically? High school teachers, for instance, might only require a minor, and so I'm curious if there's any policy on that. (Does a high school chemistry teacher count as a chemical profession? What about a middle school science teacher?)

K-8 teachers don't necessarily need any chemistry or physics college courses.  In the states where I've been involved in teacher education, the prospective teachers take science for teachers as part of their standard curriculum and pass an exam.  Good teachers will seek additional training and may even take a minor/major either pre-service or post-service.

High school teachers may only need the majors intro year courses with labs (about 10 credits depending on the state) and pass the tests for teaching chemistry, physics, or even math.  One of the ongoing frustrations in the American Physical Society and the American Association of Physics Teachers is how few people teaching physics at the high school level even have a minor in physics.  My experience in AAPT with local rural sections was we had a non-negligible number of people show up new for the first time as people who only had a year of university physics and were trying to then teach physics courses at the HS-level as the only person in the county teaching physics.  Those folks had no college courses in teaching physics or actual formal instruction related to the pedagogy of high school physics.

Chemistry tends to be slightly better in terms of having more people teaching HS chemistry who have a reasonable chemistry background, but there are still a lot of local ACS sections that work hard at supporting individuals who end up at a small rural HS as a biology expert tasked with also covering one section of chemistry, one section of physics, and possibly some math courses.


What I've seen is that ACS/APS count teachers at all levels as members of the relevant community, but the problem is exactly that those folks are practicing professionals who didn't get nearly the education prior to becoming a professional that would be mandatory in an ideal world.  Thus, the professional societies put a lot of effort into outreach to the teachers to ensure that the new generation of students are better served.  So far as I can tell, it's been a few generations now and, if anything, the number of people who end up in the classroom without the expected background has increased.

[polly_mer]

Everyone isn't going to switch to online classes or canned online labs because those things are actually crummier and don't provide the same benefits.

I agree with people not switching to what is clearly a crummier experience that doesn't meet any of the goals for why someone would engage in the activity.

However, as someone who lives in a small-by-population, large-by-geography town so there's practically nothing here, but  there are no quick trips anywhere, staying home and just ordering everything has been pretty nice.  I miss the work environment where I had dozens of colleagues mostly eager to talk research at the drop of a hat over having to make an appointment for a phone call, but I'm not missing very much else about leaving the house.

My prior-to-shutdown life was pretty much only going to work and then enjoying my large house in a quiet, safe neighborhood.

I know I'm not alone in this based on the social media in my town and the regular "water cooler" discussions as part of regularly scheduled meetings. The town thrives on people whose getting out of the house is mostly a hike in the forest.  Many of the assertions of why lockdown doesn't work and people won't stand for it for as long as necessary to reduce the overall effect of Covid-19 are pooh-poohed here.  We miss having a ton of time in our offices, labs, collaboratoria, and other spaces with excited humans doing fabulously cool things, but online ordering even before the lockdown was a standard thing.

The questions for our institution remain mostly along the lines of:

* Since we know people can work from home and be productive, will we be able to keep a work-from-home option when things really open back up?

* Is there any way to go all the way up to 24/7 shifts now for researchers so we can get more time with our equipment while still obeying all social distancing and sanitation processes?  Some people would be willing to work every night from midnight to 7 AM (leaving time for the day shift to arrive with no overlap) if it meant being reasonably safe and still being productive.

[marshwiggle]

High school teachers may only need the majors intro year courses with labs (about 10 credits depending on the state) and pass the tests for teaching chemistry, physics, or even math.  One of the ongoing frustrations in the American Physical Society and the American Association of Physics Teachers is how few people teaching physics at the high school level even have a minor in physics.  My experience in AAPT with local rural sections was we had a non-negligible number of people show up new for the first time as people who only had a year of university physics and were trying to then teach physics courses at the HS-level as the only person in the county teaching physics.  Those folks had no college courses in teaching physics or actual formal instruction related to the pedagogy of high school physics.

Yikes. In Ontario (and I'd imagine other provinces are similar), you basically have to have at least a minor in a subject to teach it in high school. (Typically, teachers need to have two "teachable" subjects, so that would usually be their major and minor.)

[Wahoo Redux]

Found out today that every last one of us will have a Blackboard shell automatically created for us well before the fall semester starts.  This has not been procedure in the past when we had to actually request a BB shell through the automated system online.  Not everyone uses BB, at least in the past.

The announcement was made two weeks ago that we are going F2F in the fall...and yet the tech center is automatically dispensing BB shells to everyone.

Do we have an administrative bait-and-switch tactic going on?

I sure hope so.  I have a good job, but I am not sure I am willing to risk stroke, blood clots, damaged organs, death, or even a miserable week in the ICU for it.

[apl68]

High school teachers may only need the majors intro year courses with labs (about 10 credits depending on the state) and pass the tests for teaching chemistry, physics, or even math.  One of the ongoing frustrations in the American Physical Society and the American Association of Physics Teachers is how few people teaching physics at the high school level even have a minor in physics.  My experience in AAPT with local rural sections was we had a non-negligible number of people show up new for the first time as people who only had a year of university physics and were trying to then teach physics courses at the HS-level as the only person in the county teaching physics.  Those folks had no college courses in teaching physics or actual formal instruction related to the pedagogy of high school physics.

Yikes. In Ontario (and I'd imagine other provinces are similar), you basically have to have at least a minor in a subject to teach it in high school. (Typically, teachers need to have two "teachable" subjects, so that would usually be their major and minor.)

In the U.S. it seems to be very rare for people who have any significant interest in STEM subjects to go into education, or for anybody who is interested in K-12 teaching to have any interest in STEM subjects.  It's not unusual for math or science teachers in K-12 to be remanufactured English majors who ran through a quick certification course to qualify to teach their subject.  Sometimes they do this to make themselves more employable, sometimes there's a bit of a salary bump for teaching the unpopular subject.

It's hard to exaggerate just how poor some of these teachers can be.  I used to know a local junior high math teacher who gave the impression of only just barely knowing more about mathematics than she was required to teach her students.  She was certainly hopeless when it came to managing her personal finances.  I nearly fell over once when she said that she couldn't understand how she could be paying and paying on her college loan and yet the balance never went down.  She was apparently unaware of a little thing called "interest," and that minimum loan payments tend to be interest-only.

With this kind of talent teaching many of our public school students, it's small wonder we have such widespread innumeracy in the U.S.

[apl68]

Found out today that every last one of us will have a Blackboard shell automatically created for us well before the fall semester starts.  This has not been procedure in the past when we had to actually request a BB shell through the automated system online.  Not everyone uses BB, at least in the past.

The announcement was made two weeks ago that we are going F2F in the fall...and yet the tech center is automatically dispensing BB shells to everyone.

Do we have an administrative bait-and-switch tactic going on?

I sure hope so.  I have a good job, but I am not sure I am willing to risk stroke, blood clots, damaged organs, death, or even a miserable week in the ICU for it.

They may be planning a bait-and-switch.  I'd guess that they more likely genuinely aspire to open in the fall, yet realize that they need to have some kind of contingency plan to go all-online if they really must.

[Aster]

The American Chemical Society is still on record as physical labs being necessary for educating chemists and other chemical professions.

I think a lot of agencies and groups are just not updating their websites right now, or they're very slow and careful with what they're releasing.

Our college had a personal chat with an ACS spokesperson back in May. They formally stated to us that it was fine to substitute fake online chemistry labs for both this summer and this fall. And so we are, and we will.

Not only chemistry, either. Once ACS backed down with chemistry labs, our admin-wonks pushed us into making every single STEM laboratory course type fully online. Us professors didn't have anyone left to support us, and faculty refusal alone was not considered enough.

[Caracal]

Everyone isn't going to switch to online classes or canned online labs because those things are actually crummier and don't provide the same benefits.

I agree with people not switching to what is clearly a crummier experience that doesn't meet any of the goals for why someone would engage in the activity.

However, as someone who lives in a small-by-population, large-by-geography town so there's practically nothing here, but  there are no quick trips anywhere, staying home and just ordering everything has been pretty nice.  I miss the work environment where I had dozens of colleagues mostly eager to talk research at the drop of a hat over having to make an appointment for a phone call, but I'm not missing very much else about leaving the house.

My prior-to-shutdown life was pretty much only going to work and then enjoying my large house in a quiet, safe neighborhood.

I know I'm not alone in this based on the social media in my town and the regular "water cooler" discussions as part of regularly scheduled meetings. The town thrives on people whose getting out of the house is mostly a hike in the forest.  Many of the assertions of why lockdown doesn't work and people won't stand for it for as long as necessary to reduce the overall effect of Covid-19 are pooh-poohed here.  We miss having a ton of time in our offices, labs, collaboratoria, and other spaces with excited humans doing fabulously cool things, but online ordering even before the lockdown was a standard thing.

I think its hard for to calibrate my experience with the work part with others. I already do "work from home" at least two days a week, but I'm now doing that with other people around instead of mostly alone, and one of those other people is a very verbal and hyper three year old. None of this has felt sustainable to me in anyway since it started. I've supported the measures that have been taken, I think they were necessary and I'm worried that the numbers aren't down as much here as one would hope, but two people with jobs, a young kid with nobody else to hang out with and basically nowhere to go, but on walks in the woods isn't something that works for any of us.

I also really do think classes online are a poor substitute in most cases. More to the point, I don't like teaching them and they don't bring me any of the feelings of satisfaction or fulfillment that in person teaching does. However, I have a hard time separating that part out from all the rest. I might feel more ok with it if we have all online classes in the fall but the kid is in daycare, assuming, that is, he can actually stay in daycare for any length of time when any sustained coughing or a fever gets him sent home for three days and that we don't all get Covid...

[Aster]

Found out today that every last one of us will have a Blackboard shell automatically created for us well before the fall semester starts.  This has not been procedure in the past when we had to actually request a BB shell through the automated system online.  Not everyone uses BB, at least in the past.

The announcement was made two weeks ago that we are going F2F in the fall...and yet the tech center is automatically dispensing BB shells to everyone.

Do we have an administrative bait-and-switch tactic going on?

Yeah, lots of colleges are saying this. Then they say something two weeks later. And something else two weeks after that. At this point, I feel that predicting how the Fall will go is mostly a waste of time.

But... I would also say that at least for now, it is highly prudent for every professor to have their courses automatically assigned to LMS shells.  Better safe than sorry. If you don't end up needing the shells, cool. But if you do need them, they're already there for you, and your college is pre-prepped for instant implementation.

Big Urban College normally gives everybody an LMS shell for each course, but there is no requirement for a professor to use the things except for certain course types. For the pandemic, we "upgraded" everyone to a higher minimum level of LMS shell, to allow everyone to operate their courses as fully online as they wanted with no software restrictions.

[Wahoo Redux]

Found out today that every last one of us will have a Blackboard shell automatically created for us well before the fall semester starts.  This has not been procedure in the past when we had to actually request a BB shell through the automated system online.  Not everyone uses BB, at least in the past.

The announcement was made two weeks ago that we are going F2F in the fall...and yet the tech center is automatically dispensing BB shells to everyone.

Do we have an administrative bait-and-switch tactic going on?

I sure hope so.  I have a good job, but I am not sure I am willing to risk stroke, blood clots, damaged organs, death, or even a miserable week in the ICU for it.

They may be planning a bait-and-switch.  I'd guess that they more likely genuinely aspire to open in the fall, yet realize that they need to have some kind of contingency plan to go all-online if they really must.

Good point.  Could be.  We also got the "guidelines" for "reopening safely" from our brand-spaking-new provost which is unbelievably, hilariously vague and unhelpful.  It is pretty clear that our new provost has absolutely no idea what to do except to acknowledge that "it may be difficult in some classroom situations to observe social distancing."  No sh**, Sherlock.

This is very stressful.

[Caracal]

I can't remember  the source, but the statistic I heard a few years ago was that now about 25% of couples meet online. It doesn't have to be close to 100% to be very disruptive.

In the case of online dating, I'd assume it has basically replaced "going to bars or clubs with the express purpose of meeting someone." It just was that lots of people always met people who were in school with them, or because they were a friend of a friend.

[Caracal]

Good point.  Could be.  We also got the "guidelines" for "reopening safely" from our brand-spaking-new provost which is unbelievably, hilariously vague and unhelpful.  It is pretty clear that our new provost has absolutely no idea what to do except to acknowledge that "it may be difficult in some classroom situations to observe social distancing."  No sh**, Sherlock.

This is very stressful.

Well, we do have a whole plan involving hybrid which I think will probably work fairly well in the sense that I think classrooms should make it fairly easily to stay six feet away from anyone who is around for a prolonged period of time. The problem is that I think that those kinds of precautions are only effective if you have a low prevalence of COVID in the community and you're trying to avoid fast spreading outbreaks. It isn't going to make it low risk to be a in a room with an infected person for an hour.