Last week saw a slew of universities “announce” their plans for the summer. Some of them appear to be treating it as a strategic exercise in getting one over on competitors (“look how open we are!”), but with one or two exceptions, this exercise is probably a misreading of the situation: pretty much everyone is going to be massively online/remote for the fall. Going remote, to be clear, is a good thing. I know that some people like making distinctions
It’s hard to tell from the outside what universities are talking about these days, because there is this veil of secrecy up about what planning is happening. But I’ve heard that, at a couple of schools at least, the focus is very much on the question of credit hours. As in, “credit hours = contact hours, so if your course isn’t completely synchronous, how do we know students deserve three credits?” Sigh. There are short and long answers to this
Le français suit l’anglais Good morning, everyone. Today’s blog is a bit different from the usual format. I am here to ask you all to participate in an act of radical self-interest. A few weeks ago, I suggested that the biggest problem Canadian universities would face this fall was working out how to deliver those big, ugly first-year classes online. I also suggested that many of those big first year-courses cover similar topics (e.g. Microeconomics 100, Introduction to Physics, etc.) and
No one wants to be the first one to say it, so I will. Regular academic workloads are going to have to be re-arranged for the Summer and Fall Terms. In most cases drastically. This is simple math. Providing quality teaching in the fall is going to require – in part – significantly smaller classes. This will not only be true if the fall is fully online. It will also be true if – as the currently fashionable musing has
So, last week I suggested that the Fall term was likely both to start and finish online because of practical difficulties in pivoting halfway though in most institutions. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is that most pivot scenarios assume that students who will start off learning at home are able to drop everything and find local accommodations with very short notice, and not all students are in a position to do that. This would leave institutions either
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