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 like “big classes = bad, small classes = good”, but this is to misunderstand the way in which universities and colleges can play a role in transmitting the disease.  It’s not the size of the class that matters, it’s the degree to which students interconnect with one another in close proximity even in the absence of large classes.  This study from Cornell, one of the most important since the crisis began (IMHO), shows that the number of student-pair interactions (i.e. opportunities for the disease to spread) are only reduced by about 20% if you go from max class size of 100 to max class size of 30.  The issue is mixing between classes, or reducing the number of classes, rather than the absolute size of class.

Most people seem to get this, and so to the extent that we are seeing differences in the wording of plans about the fall term, they tend to be differences in style or emphasis rather than substance.  Take, for instance, the contrasting announcements between l’Université de Montréal – the first institution to make a public stance – and McGill: two quite similar universities in the same metro area that has been absolutely hammered by the epidemic.  L’UdeM’s message was pretty stark, and maybe a little downbeat, but the message was clear: any teaching which can be done remotely will be done remotely with the possibility of other classes here and there.  McGill’s was much more HUZZAH, THERE MAY BE CLASSES HERE AND THERE! but yeah, we’re pretty much online too.

Go across the 30-odd institutions that announced plans last week and with two notable exceptions, they all follow the same pattern: “mostly on-line with some stuff, maybe, kinda in-person, we’ll see”.  The hedging around the non-online stuff is where these announcements get weird.  As a rule, the more open to non-online activity an announcement seems to be, the more confusing and less useful a guide to planning it seems to be.  The University of Calgary announced that instruction would be provided by a mix of face-to-face and online learning and that:

“we are aiming to have approximately 30% of our students on each of our campuses at any one time. Priority will be given to small classes and experiential learning opportunities such as labs, tutorials, and seminars. Safety measures, such as limits on the size of gatherings, and public health guidelines will need to be observed.”

Now if you take out the bit saying “30% at each campus”, this is basically the same announcement everyone else has made.  But that 30% is really confusing.   How is this going to work?   Does it mean professors will have to do some courses in-person and some online?  Does it mean that students from outside Calgary will need to live in Calgary because 30% (or something like it) of required courses will be in person and the rest online?  If not, does it mean the institution is going to need to teach the same course twice?  No information whatsoever was forthcoming.

My sense, FWIW, is that where you see formulations which make a big yet ultimately vague and somewhat confusing gesture towards some activity occurring face-to-face (e.g. Calgary, McGill), what you are seeing is a papering over of some fundamental differences between deans of various faculties, some of whom (I would guess Engineering and Medicine) are insisting they cannot operate remotely and some of whom are looking at the equity implications of partly-online, partly-in-person teaching and saying “no thanks”.   They are less guides to what will happen than communiqués from an ongoing set of unresolved internal political skirmishes.

That brings me to Western, which is the one sort-of outlier from the announcements to date, because it seems to be offering a much stronger guarantee of some face-to-face education.  President Alan Shepherd says he anticipates “a “mixed model” in which some of our courses (or parts of them) will be delivered virtually, and others face-to-face.”  This means that “[b]eyond organizing more than 3,000 undergraduate and graduate classes, we are also planning for residence spaces, alternative classrooms, transportation, testing centres, expanded food services to accommodate physical distancing, research and clinical protocols, the need to have space for self-isolation for students arriving from afar, ongoing recruitment efforts, communication efforts on all of the above—and more.“

However, “physical distancing requirements will reduce the capacity of our campus and depending on parameters in the fall, the reductions could be significant. These constraints complicate our planning and we are building out scenarios working with an architectural and space planning firm to help guide us.”

This is a clever formulation, because it holds out the promise of something different, but it leaves an enormous amount of wiggle room: Western isn’t guaranteeing anything at all – yet.  Indeed, if you look at where Western is putting its money – hiring hundreds of extra summer interns to put more material online, doubling student staff in the Instruction Technology Resource Center and hiring a dozen new instructional developers – one gets the strong impression that they know full well that the bulk of the term is going to happen online. So, this might just be an elaborate PR exercise. We’ll see.

Might any institutions go full face-to-face to lure students from those that have been forced online?  It’s possible.  We have yet to see plans from institutions in New Brunswick and PEI – jurisdictions where the curve has already planked – and it’s not completely out of the question that some of these schools, especially those which have suffered significant drops in enrolments over the years, might try to make a play for bigger student numbers by promising greater face-to-face engagement.  I have my doubts: I kind of think that Canadian institutions, unlike American ones, are unlikely to risk student safety for mere dollars.

Meanwhile, we’re going to keep watching institutions to understand what they mean when they say they will have “small classes” or “conferences”, or – maybe most significantly – what they mean by “residences may be open”.   My guess: institutions that can get away with science and engineering labs for upper-year students will do so (it will depend in part on the layout of existing labs, and their ability to run extra shifts to accommodate smaller numbers of students), graduate instruction will stay in person, but pretty much everything else will stay remote/online.