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

[Vkw10]

Imagine how much cheaper it would be if all classes were taught online.

How can it get cheaper than an instructor showing up in the classroom, delivering a lecture, and interacting with the students in person?

Well, how much would we save on facilities and classroom technology if every prof were teaching from a laptop?  Not to mention the small incidentals such as copying costs and janitorial work?

Tech support, increased costs for bandwidth, fees to license copyrighted works for online use? Tech support will be a huge expense, as an amazing number of both students and faculty struggle with fairly basic tech, like saving a Word file as an accessible PDF.

[polly_mer]

I teach lab science classes. These involve hands on skills that cannot be replicated through any sort of virtual lab. You also need specialized equipment, so no lab in your kitchen. There really is no satisfactory alternative to labs like these.

Right, so what do people in situations like these do? Mine is somewhat like that. If we just give away passing grades & credits we're not giving them an education. If we fail them we're not being fair to them. If we give them 'inc' then when/how does it get completed?

An incomplete gets finished when the institution reopens.  Being set back a term for specific courses falls into the category of "life is unfair", but is the best option for a real education.

Sure, we all know how incomplete grades work, but this is different. If the student has not received the full serving of beans and rice, there was nothing to digest. The incomplete is not supposed to mean the learning didn't happen because you didn't get your training. It means your part of the arrangement (the student's work) has been delayed but there's reason to believe it will be finished in the near future. As I've always understood things anyway.
I'll do whatever the college and department guide me towards. I can't imagine they could tolerate a slew of incomplete grades in the fall though. Imagine how things play out if the same professor isn't interested in being rehired at that time?

I can't imagine not allowing incompletes for courses in which students must get the full helping as a true prerequisite in a planned curriculum.  That's my engineering hat with plenty of experience dealing with my colleagues in nursing and social work.  It's simply not an option to allow people to skip foundational knowledge since everything is cumulative.

Thus, I expect the situation to be (a) the course is important enough to get a faculty member to teach the incompleteness in the fall by whatever means necessary or (b) acknowledgement that the course can just be a participation grade at the end of this term for anyone who didn't drop when the dropping was good because some exposure to the material is sufficient.

I expect that anything that truly matters to the standardized-across-nearly-all-institutions majors is some combination of getting an incomplete with possible options on summer/fall completion with succeeding courses being renovated for this particular cohort all the way up so that all the material is in the curriculum with some less core material being omitted this time to make space for an extra half-term of material being bumped.

Testing out of some courses may be an option as a way to fix the incompletes since some courses are pretty amenable to self study with access to the internet.

[mahagonny]

I teach lab science classes. These involve hands on skills that cannot be replicated through any sort of virtual lab. You also need specialized equipment, so no lab in your kitchen. There really is no satisfactory alternative to labs like these.

Right, so what do people in situations like these do? Mine is somewhat like that. If we just give away passing grades & credits we're not giving them an education. If we fail them we're not being fair to them. If we give them 'inc' then when/how does it get completed?

An incomplete gets finished when the institution reopens.  Being set back a term for specific courses falls into the category of "life is unfair", but is the best option for a real education.

Sure, we all know how incomplete grades work, but this is different. If the student has not received the full serving of beans and rice, there was nothing to digest. The incomplete is not supposed to mean the learning didn't happen because you didn't get your training. It means your part of the arrangement (the student's work) has been delayed but there's reason to believe it will be finished in the near future. As I've always understood things anyway.
I'll do whatever the college and department guide me towards. I can't imagine they could tolerate a slew of incomplete grades in the fall though. Imagine how things play out if the same professor isn't interested in being rehired at that time?

I can't imagine not allowing incompletes for courses in which students must get the full helping as a true prerequisite in a planned curriculum.  That's my engineering hat with plenty of experience dealing with my colleagues in nursing and social work.  It's simply not an option to allow people to skip foundational knowledge since everything is cumulative.

Thus, I expect the situation to be (a) the course is important enough to get a faculty member to teach the incompleteness in the fall by whatever means necessary or (b) acknowledgement that the course can just be a participation grade at the end of this term for anyone who didn't drop when the dropping was good because some exposure to the material is sufficient.

I expect that anything that truly matters to the standardized-across-nearly-all-institutions majors is some combination of getting an incomplete with possible options on summer/fall completion with succeeding courses being renovated for this particular cohort all the way up so that all the material is in the curriculum with some less core material being omitted this time to make space for an extra half-term of material being bumped.

Testing out of some courses may be an option as a way to fix the incompletes since some courses are pretty amenable to self study with access to the internet.

As accurate as it is dreary and depressing. Of course tomorrow I may feel different. 'They'll figure it out -- they're the adjuncts.'

[Wahoo Redux]

Imagine how much cheaper it would be if all classes were taught online.

How can it get cheaper than an instructor showing up in the classroom, delivering a lecture, and interacting with the students in person?

Well, how much would we save on facilities and classroom technology if every prof were teaching from a laptop?  Not to mention the small incidentals such as copying costs and janitorial work?

Tech support, increased costs for bandwidth, fees to license copyrighted works for online use? Tech support will be a huge expense, as an amazing number of both students and faculty struggle with fairly basic tech, like saving a Word file as an accessible PDF.

More expensive than actually running a campus?  Don't think so.  We generally have copyrighted works for the classroom included in these automatic enroll course software deals with the publishing houses, not to mention the mass of free stuff already on the Web that many of us use regularly.  And most of us are at least savvy enough to work Word, GoogleDocs, PowerPoint, PDF conversion (free online on a number of sites), Blackboard or D2L. 

Personally I suspect there will be no long term changes to higher ed.  But it will be interesting.

[mahagonny]

What's a better sign? Students asking for a refund or them not asking for it? If you should get a refund then it means in person teaching is better.

[polly_mer]

The CHE has another entry in possible changes to higher ed.

What's a better sign? Students asking for a refund or them not asking for it? If you should get a refund then it means in person teaching is better.

What did the students get for their money, time, and effort?

I've certainly encountered classes in which students should have demanded refunds even for full-time, in-person classes taught by people who should have been experts with substantial experience, 

My personal favorite was students paying for a class at the CC that counted as meeting a requirement, but wouldn't count towards credits for graduation, as a way to avoid one terrible face-to-face professor at Super Dinky.

I was amazed to see students then eager to take that same professor's online courses so I checked.  That person was a great online professor with gen ed courses that were interesting and required reasonable effort to earn a good grade.  Online had no mumbling into the board with the driest lecture possible, but instead had links to great productions with good discussion prompts.  Online had lively discussion instead of mostly factual lecture.  Online had assessments designed to help students integrate themes instead of gotcha tests on footnotes in readings.

[polly_mer]

The CHE looks at financial effects of the timing of the covid-19 virus in the budget year

[spork]

Scenario Planning for Coronavirus

For the previous year's admissions cycle, we had an unusually large incoming class, after missing our enrollment target by 12% the year before. Most faculty reacted with "ok, crisis over, back to usual." I tried making the argument that this was a temporary blip. No reaction.

Now let's assume a scenario similar to what's in the article linked above: spring semester ends without universities resuming face-to-face instruction on campuses. Students have been scattered hither and yon for weeks/months. Simultaneously we have a global recession. Household finances get really tight over the summer. Perhaps by July/August some people realize that there are other places looking to enroll students like Madison and Zachary, many of which are more prestigious and less expensive than where they were enrolled before.

Put more simply: my employer is > 90% tuition dependent, with the bulk of that being undergraduate tuition. If the university is all-online as of the fall semester, there's no reason for students to come here.

[spork]

Spoke to some behind the scenes people on campus today. We are probably going to take a big financial hit -- disruption of the admissions cycle, demands for refunds on campus housing and tuition, more transfers, etc.

[Wahoo Redux]

We are a commuter campus with an almost entirely local student body, many of whom live at home.  I hope that this will keep the damage down as we transition to finish the semester on-line.   This same dynamic may help CCs through the crisis? 

[Parasaurolophus]

I am not doing a particularly good job of migrating things online. My university is totally the kind of place that would muscle out the instructional staff if it could, and I'm not intrerested in looking expendable.

One thing I have to say, though, is that I'm glad the crisis will force my colleagues to lower their assessment standards a bit. For the most part, they're just not appropriate to our student body, a substantial portion of which (i.e. all the international students--which is a lot of students) are being taken advantage of, and really aren't prepared for a university education in a foreign language. My colleagues accept a 75% failure rate in their courses, which is just crazypants. (For my part: a bare pass is relatively easy in my classes, but doing well is not.)

[Hibush]

The airline industry has asked Congress for an immediate infusion of $25 billion to tide them over the restructuring they are doing this week and those coming right up. They want another $25 million in loans to handle the restructuring a little bit further ahead. Why isn't the higher-ed industry in there with the same request?

[Diogenes]

The airline industry has asked Congress for an immediate infusion of $25 billion to tide them over the restructuring they are doing this week and those coming right up. They want another $25 million in loans to handle the restructuring a little bit further ahead. Why isn't the higher-ed industry in there with the same request?

Because capitalism grants for-profits first in line when it comes to unearned handouts. Higher ed will have to just pull itself up by it's own boot straps.

[spork]

The airline industry has asked Congress for an immediate infusion of $25 billion to tide them over the restructuring they are doing this week and those coming right up. They want another $25 million in loans to handle the restructuring a little bit further ahead. Why isn't the higher-ed industry in there with the same request?

This is a great example of public choice theory.

[marshwiggle]

The airline industry has asked Congress for an immediate infusion of $25 billion to tide them over the restructuring they are doing this week and those coming right up. They want another $25 million in loans to handle the restructuring a little bit further ahead. Why isn't the higher-ed industry in there with the same request?

Because capitalism grants for-profits first in line when it comes to unearned handouts. Higher ed will have to just pull itself up by it's own boot straps.

To be fair, in principle for-profit companies are putting money into government coffers via business taxes and income taxes of employees, while government-funded institutions like universities are always taking money from the government and would always be happy with more. I'm well aware that for me to work where I do requires all kinds of tax money from for-profit businesses and individuals who work for them. So at times bailouts make sense.

(Note: Companies like investment banks that don't actually create wealth but made money off sub-prime mortgages, etc. are in a different category. Same for Enron, and others where their apparent success is based on some sort of fraud. Bailouts in those cases are counter-productive since they'll just mess up the economy further.)