Spring 2022 -- Moving Online?

[Puget]

Just announced that we'll be online for the first two weeks, through 2/1. They seem committed to being in person after that but I guess we'll see. Students can move in on schedule or anytime during those first two weeks-- negative test required for move-in. Boosters required for everyone.

[downer]

One place I work at sent out an email saying resolutely that there will be no changes for the plans for the Spring.

If I were cynical, I'd suspect that in fact they are waiting for students to return to campus and then they will say, "oh, actually, the start of the semester needs to be online."

Fortunately, I'm not in the least cynical.

[arcturus]

One place I work at sent out an email saying resolutely that there will be no changes for the plans for the Spring.

If I were cynical, I'd suspect that in fact they are waiting for students to return to campus and then they will say, "oh, actually, the start of the semester needs to be online."

Fortunately, I'm not in the least cynical.

My own "cynical" hope is that the returning students will transmit their various contagions efficiently (covid, flu, what-have-you), so that we get a brief spike and not an extended high plateau.

[AmLitHist]

All the local hospitals are stuffed beyond capacity (including ERs containing "boarders" who stay there for days waiting to be taken to a floor, often doubled up in treatment areas, lined up both sides in hallways, and so on), with daily numbers rising steeply and already well in excess of the record highs set earlier in the pandemic.

Surgeries and non-emergency non-COVID labs and testing have been cancelled in the big hospitals and, increasingly, in the suburbs and rural areas. There have been reports of people dying in rural hospitals because the Big City hospitals--after searching up to 300 miles away--can't take them.*

All this to say, I feel sure we'll start in-person on the 18th. (Service Week, starting Monday, only officially went virtual yesterday, after a flood of sick leave requests for the on-campus days showed that just a few dozen people planned to be in attendance.) "We're sure everything will be fine" will be the standard rationale, as students and faculty again drop like flies.
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*I'm far less worried about COVID right now than I am about something "normal" (heart attack, stroke, accident, etc.) happening, and not having anywhere to be treated.

[downer]

A friend at a local school tells me that they are planning online courses for the whole spring, mainly due to student demand for that. He is very happy about it.

I see Rochester is going online for January, and has provided a long explanation. https://www.rochester.edu/coronavirus-update/important-update-on-spring-2022-semester/

I guess at this stage I'd be happier for everything to be online, at least for the first month, not because of concerns about my health, but because so many people are out in various jobs that planning to do anything is going to be difficult. And lots of students are going to be out, making more work for me if trying to cater to them too.

[AmLitHist]

I've been watching our department's numbers across all campuses since Thanksgiving (ex-chair affliction, apparently). While our online and virtual lectures have had high enrollments all that time, as I've mentioned here earlier, within the past week our F2F numbers have plummeted. It's impossible to find more than a couple of non-ESL classes with double-digit enrollment; many FT faculty's sections at my campus have enrollments of 4-8 students, after having numbers in the 12+ range during earlier registration.

Service Week starts tomorrow. It was finally moved fully online late last week. We'll see what TPTB say about moving those F2F online; I'd think they'd want to, just to get enrollments back up. (We got paid full pay for all low-enrolled classes last fall, thanks to the federal Covid funds; that money has to be running out, I'd think. And lots of faculty benefited, e.g., I had a F2F lit class with 3 students, and a lot of friends taught sections with only 1 or 2 students.)

[Sun_Worshiper]

We'll be in person, for the most part, but students are allowed to Zoom in if they get sick.

[kiana]

Our f2f enrollment is still very similar to our online enrollment, but we don't start for a couple of weeks (thank heavens).

Winterim classes got moved online. They haven't made an announcement yet about spring, and we have no idea what they will do.

I shifted back to a more traditional midterm + final structure (rather than shorter tests every few weeks). I'm pretty much done with pretending that online algebra tests are in any way valid, and I'm hoping it'll have petered out by midterm, and if not then, by finals.

[lightning]

Our f2f enrollment is still very similar to our online enrollment, but we don't start for a couple of weeks (thank heavens).

Winterim classes got moved online. They haven't made an announcement yet about spring, and we have no idea what they will do.

I shifted back to a more traditional midterm + final structure (rather than shorter tests every few weeks). I'm pretty much done with pretending that online algebra tests are in any way valid, and I'm hoping it'll have petered out by midterm, and if not then, by finals.

I was thinking of doing the same thing.

[larryc]

Update: Yep, we're in person when classes begin tomorrow.

I think we've all noticed the shift in the last few weeks in this country. No one is talking about protecting the vulnerable anymore, Dems and Repubs alike are all about "getting back to normal."

I am in a blue state with perhaps the best governor in the nation for dealing with COVID and we are supposedly going back to the classroom in two weeks. This is of course insane, but the costs of going online (loss of $ from dorms and cafeterias) are huge. So the admin is talking about our supposedly high vaccination rates and how everything will be just fine.

[Hegemony]

Entering week 2, we are still in person. There is massive uproar among the faculty. The number of COVID cases has increased by about eightfold. In my program, 2 out of 6 faculty are out with COVID. The rest are reporting that around a third of the class is absent, either with COVID or waiting for the results of a test. We are now told to teach hybrid so those students can keep up — hybrid, the least effective ways out of all the ways of teaching. The classrooms are not set up for it or anything convenient like that. It's a shambles. I'm not sure the students are getting that "in-person experience" the administrators insist is crucial at any cost. Faculty are in despair. It's actually worse than this time last year, when at least we knew for certain that we were online for the whole semester.  Now no one knows what's going to happen, the administrators have their fingers in their ears, and meanwhile the National Guard has been deployed to keep the hospital running.

[Parasaurolophus]

Y'know, they should have just turned the winter semester into the summer break, and had a regular semester in the summer instead.

We start today, and I'm well out of it.

[OneMoreYear]

I hear you Hegemony.

First week of classes. I teach a Monday 9am in-person class (~30 enrolled), though we are hy-flexing so students can Zoom in if needed.  Anyone want to guess how many students came in-person?

Did you guess 1? Yup, 1 student.

I can't say I blame them.  We are in one of the states that has called in the National Guard to deal with the covid surge.  We have a mask mandate, but no vaccine mandate and classrooms are back to full capacity.

But, the continual announcements that administration is sending about how we are back to normal and our students WANT in-person classes? Yeah, that's just crap.

[kiana]

I wonder if you could just teach online from the classroom and have anyone who shows up login to zoom and use headphones? Then it's technically "flex" but you're not trying to manage two modalities at once.

[Puget]

I wonder if you could just teach online from the classroom and have anyone who shows up login to zoom and use headphones? Then it's technically "flex" but you're not trying to manage two modalities at once.

Hearing things through both headphones and in person does not work well, especially as there is usually a slight delay.