Thoughts on Teaching – Teaching in a Pandemic – Campus Guidelines – 08/28/2020

In trying to figure everything out on how to teach in a pandemic this semester, we received a lot of different emails from administrators and staff at my college. I had to clarify and render all of the different information down into a format that I could present to my students. I just thought I would share here what that ended up looking like. I am going to share the one from my hybrid classes as they are the ones who have to come to campus at some point.

This is what my syllabus starts with this semester:

COVID-19 Information

Due to the COVID-19 situation this semester, the following restrictions are in place for the Fall semester:

• Teaching and workspaces will be limited to 50% of maximum capacity. Students in this class will be divided into two cohorts, with each cohort meeting on either Monday or Wednesday. This cohort division will be visible in the Canvas classroom and will be communicated to you via email and Canvas Announcement. You will not be allowed to attend class on a day when your cohort is not allowed to attend.
• Same day attendance tracking through Canvas is mandatory for all hybrid classes. 
• Assigned seating is mandatory for all hybrid courses.
• A student reporting potential illness serves as sufficient grounds to excuse the absence. This means you are not allowed on campus or in the classroom if you: 
  1. have current symptoms of illness
  2. have been exposed to someone who has symptoms of illness and have not yet been cleared by a health professional to return to class and/or passed the quarantine stage
  3. have received a positive test for COVID-19 and have not yet been cleared by a health professional to return to class
  4. are quarantined because someone you have been in contact with has received a positive test for COVID-19
• Students who are COVID-19 positive must report this status to Student Services. Students are not required to disclose symptoms to anyone, including your instructor. This means that you do not have to tell me anything more than that one of those 4 conditions above applies to you (and you do not have to tell me which one).
  • If you are actively sick with COVID-19, you are not expected to complete work for the class at that time. If the symptoms are mild, you are welcome to keep up with the work as you feel able to.
    • You will contact the instructor once your sickness has ended to see about what make-up work will be needed.
  • If you are quarantined but not actually sick, you are expected to keep up with all assignments for each week as if you are in the cohort that is not coming to campus. You are not allowed on campus during the quarantine, and so even if your cohort is to meet in-person that week, you will be online only that week.
• In the event of a COVID-19 positive confirmation in a College building, the institution will:
  • Identify locations impacted and implement cleaning protocols.
  • Complete trace procedures to identify those who may have come in contact.
  • Notify those who may have come into contact while protecting the identities of the COVID-19 positive individual.
• Employees and students will self-monitor temperatures as well as other COVID-19 symptoms through the wellness self-check.
  • Students shall be introduced to the wellness check during the first class meeting. Self-check signage/messages will be posted in classrooms and workspaces.
• It is the responsibility of the student to have and wear a mask. A student who cannot wear a mask but who does not have an approved exception should not take face-to-face classes. If this applies to you, you need to go to Student Services to see about moving to an online class.
• Eating and drinking occur in private offices when a lone occupant is present or outside College buildings, where the College has provided seating. Classrooms and instructional support locations are never eating or drinking sites.
• Breaks from classes to allow for personal wellbeing are allowed and encouraged. 
• Students and faculty are encouraged to bring wipes if they so choose and to clean their workspaces before and after uses. Disinfectant wipes should be placed in the wastebasket in each classroom after use.
• We are maximizing fresh air flow into College buildings to decrease the potential virus load. Classroom and workspace doors shall remain open when occupied. All unoccupied rooms will remain locked.
• Faculty Office hours will be maintained with student visits occurring by appointment only. Maintain social distancing at all times and keep records of visits for tracing purposes. Faculty members are encouraged to conduct meetings via Skype, Big Blue Button, or Zoom when telecommunication serves the student.

You will be required to confirm during the first week of class that you understand and will abide by these restrictions. If you do not agree to abide by these restrictions, you will need to go to Student Services to be transferred to an online class if available. 

Finally, if things change through the semester, I will contact you with what the changes are and how that will affect us as we move forward.

Thoughts on Teaching – A Depressing Class – 9/19/2013

I know I missed last week, so I will try to double up this week on posts.  This first one concerns last week’s class, which was quite depressing.  That is one reason that I did not have the motivation or energy to write about it last week.  Yet, I want to make sure to write about my class weekly, and so, I am not going to leave last week out.  I just needed some cool down time before I set anything down on “paper.”

So, here’s what happened:

For my hybrid class, I have the last assignments close on Sunday night at midnight.  That means that I spend Monday going through and entering grades from the previous week.  So, we were essentially heading into Week 3 of my class at that point, and I had a chance to see, before I met them that week, how the previous assignments had gone.  In addition to the normal weekly assignments, however, I also had a set of assignments that I call the Initial Assignments and Orientations, which is a basic set of things like reading the syllabus, signing up for the textbook site, taking a few introductory surveys, and the like.  To get credit, you simply have to complete these things, at which point I will give you a 100.  If you do not do them, you get a 0.  It counts for 5% of the overall grade.  Largely, I see it as an assignment to get the students going and get them comfortable in the classroom.  So, I was entering both the grades for that assignment and for the weekly assignments due just before.  What I found was a completely dismal set of grades.  This has nothing to do with my online class but is unique to my hybrid class this semester.  When the only grade on the orientation assignment is either a 100 or 0, then a class average of 50 means that only half of the people did the assignment.  And, I had between a 45 and 55 average with the hybrid sections, meaning that roughly half of the class did not do them.  The assignment had been open for the first 12 days of the semester, and only half of the students had bothered to complete it.  Then, as I was entering the weekly grades, I noted that not only had a significant minority not done the chapter assignments they had in the textbook website, but that about a quarter of my students had not even signed up yet, even though we were already two chapters into the assignments at that point.

That made me rather depressed right there.  The assignments that I have set out as graded assignments, and, not to mention, the first graded assignments of the semester, are not being completed by my students.  Then, I took a dangerous turn for the worst.  I had set up the students for the coming week to do three things — to access my online lectures, complete two chapters in the textbook, and view some video lectures on an external site.  What the students don’t know is that I can directly track who does what in my LMS (Learning Management System), as the LMS allows me to see how many “clicks” there have been on each thing that I have given the students to do.  That is always a depressing thing to look at, because it puts directly in your face as a teacher how few students are bothering to access the material you are requiring them to do.  What I found confirmed my suspicions, as a dismally small number of students had accessed anything at all in preparation for that week’s activities.  They had not read my online lectures.  They had not completed the textbook material.  They had not looked at the external link to the video lectures.  When I say they had not, I mean that the number of clicks in the classroom equalled about 1/4 of the students in the class.  That is even optimistic, as it assumes that each click is a distinct student, which is not necessarily true.

The problem with this is probably obvious.  I assigned something, and the students did not do it.  Beyond that, however, I am currently employing the flipped model of classroom, which means that the students access the central “lecture” material for the course outside of the classroom, and then we apply the material in classroom activities.  So, if the students are not prepared, we cannot work.

So, all of that is depressing enough, but what made it a depressing class is that I then had to address this in class.  I have to have a talk with students every semester that I teach.  It is the nature, especially, of a community college that the students are not ready for college.  They do not know what it means to be in college, and most approach it as just an extension of high school.  We have a large DFW rate each semester (a D (which does not transfer), and F, or a withdrawal.  It usually runs between 40-50% of students in the freshman core classes, like mine.  We have done everything we can to try and fix this, and one of the things I have to do is have that heart-to-heart talk every semester about what they are doing here in college.  I ask them directly to think about why they are there.  I ask them to consider what is making them come to college and whether they are putting out the effort necessary to succeed.  I also talk about what it means to be successful in college.  And, honestly, I ask them to consider if this is something they value at all.  I point out that nobody is making them show up to class, do the work, and so forth.  I can do everything on my end to try and get them to succeed, but if they can’t meet me at least halfway, then it will be a failure.  This is not high school, and nobody is going to get a C for showing up.  I can and will fail them, which is something that most have not heard before.  I ask them to consider what it is they are wasting by being in college and wasting the opportunity they have — whether its money, their time, my time, another student’s chance to be in the class, or whatever.  I am blunt.  I am direct.  And, I am not particularly nice about it.  I don’t like doing this, which makes for a depressing week, as I then had to do the same thing in all of the other classes that week, which meant that day-by-day I had to drag myself to class to deliver one depressing talk after another.  And, sadly, I don’t know if it does any good.  I can’t know, really, and that is also depressing.

A week of depressing talk later, and I, as you can probably imagine, really didn’t have much interest in blogging about it.  Now, I am a couple of days out of it, and things are a bit further in my mind, leaving me able to talk about it without getting all worked up again.

And, in case you were wondering, after having that talk, no, the rest of the class that day did not go particularly well either.