Are you going back in person in the fall? This question has been on my mind a lot recently--likely on yours, too. As with everything COVID-related over the past year, I’ve been (hyper-)alert to changing conditions.
The Minister of Advanced Education (Alberta’s Quietest Cabinet Minister™) issued a press release on March 18 to “encourage all post-secondary institutions, students and families to prepare for a full return to on-campus learning this September.” Oh, but there wouldn’t be any extra funding or anything. How encouraging.
In response, the UAlberta President wrote a brief, vaguely worded blog post, emphasizing the importance of safety in the return to campus. Previously, the Provost made a more concrete commitment on February 23, promising that Bear Tracks would reveal which Fall classes would be online and which would be in person on April 26. In other words, not all classes would be in person.
The problem is that there was a bit of a gap: Who would be making the decision to be in person or not? Would individual instructors get to decide? Or would there be some kind of formula, like classes larger than 100 would be online, whereas smaller classes would be in-person in a big room to space people out? No information was provided to front-line instructors at all. No worries, though, I’m sure that would get sorted out in time. Right?
I found that the Office of the Registrar’s website made some promises on behalf of instructors in their 2021-22 Academic Year FAQs for Students (archived; originally posted February 24): “We know that there may be circumstances that prevent you from attending in-person. If this is your situation, please contact your instructor to make alternative arrangements to allow you to complete the course outcomes.”
Er, what? I’m going to digress on this for a bit. If I’ve committed to teaching in-person classes and a student gets sick with, oh I dunno, some kind of nasty virus, I would have to accommodate them. How exactly? One option is that I would then--in addition to teaching the course in person--also record separate lecture videos. That’s a big nope. There’s no way I would have enough time to do that. Then the only other option would require some capacity to record the live in-person lectures and post them online.
I had heard some rumours that classrooms would be outfitted with equipment to do this. It would require a webcam and microphone, as well as some video capture software. Just to be sure, however, I contacted IST about their plans for this. No one at IST knew of any plan, so my inquiry was bumped up until it reached the Associate VP and Chief Information Officer. (For some context, low-level people like me do not routinely have direct contact with people so much higher than my pay grade. So you can imagine my surprise.)
I was glad to hear that there are plans to outfit some classrooms with a camera, mic, and document camera, which would allow Zoom or Stream2 to record and/or stream content. However, “the actual timing is uncertain because the work requires time and effort by tradespeople, and their ranks have been decimated by the cuts. I wouldn't want to have you plan all summer for hybrid delivery, only to have those plans wrecked by labour uncertainties.” So, thanks again, Minister of Advanced Education, and the Government of Alberta. Thanks for nothing.
(I contacted the Registrar about the promises their FAQ made on my behalf, and two weeks later finally got a reply. The FAQs were being re-worded. As of this writing, the promise about “alternative arrangements” has been removed.)
In the meantime, I received an email from the person who coordinates teaching in the Department of Psychology. I had a week to decide (by April 1) which of my Fall and Winter term courses I would like to be in-person, and which would be taught remotely. I reached out to the Associate Chair of the Department, who didn’t have any more information to go on.
But what about students? It’s well-known that many students are struggling through the pandemic. (Hey, I know all about the struggle.) Yet, what if everyone wanted to continue remote learning? Or the opposite? This information would help inform my decision. I set up polls for my classes and asked if students wanted to go back a) in person, b) online, c) it doesn’t matter, or d) don’t know. Here are the results:
Ok, so it looks like a fair number of students would still accept the remote/online option. But an almost equal number would not.
This is like trying to solve one equation with 100 unknowns. For me, one issue is the painstakingly slow vaccine rollout (The Atlantic referred to it as “Canada’s Vaccine Mess”). If everyone could be fully vaccinated by September 1, this would not be such a concern. Another issue is the greater virulence of the COVID-19 variants. How effective are the vaccines against the variants? Another unknown. What about my kids? Will they be vaccinated by the fall, and should they go back in person? Unknown.
For what it’s worth, I made my decision: Remote teaching in the Fall (due to my inherent pessimism); in-person in the Winter (due to my inherent optimism).
Why aren’t you studying?
