| Hey 0d9eooo, with respect you have no idea what's actually happening. My wife attends one of the colleges mentioned in TFA, and at that college everything that you imagine cannot be the case, is actually the case. > major universities doing online stuff have video production crews Yes, but those crews don't have the bandwidth to suddenly help every professor transition to online teaching in the space of two weeks. Also, the online versions of courses which those professionally produced videos are part of, are priced lower than the in-person courses which are currently being taught on Zoom. However at my wife’s college the price has not come down, no partial refunds are being given, no deferments are being allowed, and no transitions to part-time are being allowed. In other words, students get to choose between leaving the course or paying the same vast amount of money for a reduced level of service. > It's not like some zoom meeting off-the-cuff with your professor who had to switch gears on the spot along with you No, that's precisely what it is. One week all classes were in person, then the college cancelled all classes for two weeks to transition, then all classes resumed on Zoom. Neither the professors nor the students had any more warning than that. The college did pay for a Zoom Enterprise subscription so that classes aren’t time-limited by Zoom’s free tier, but that was the extent of the help given to professors. Many professors have never used video conferencing before, or have poor WiFi. Many students have no private quiet spaces to join chats because they’re sharing accommodation in a very expensive city. There was inadequate time and no training or help for professors to adjust lesson plans or teaching resources, and library and printing facilities were closed to students. The college’s entire response was very ad-hoc. This is perfectly understandable in the circumstances, all of us are making it up as we go along. The problem is that this institution is still charging the same sky-high tuition (six figures for a course) to students who are pouring into it their life savings, or going into lifelong debt. Meanwhile the college is delivering less value and sitting on an enormous multi-billion dollar endowment. We’re not involved in the lawsuit, but we certainly understand where it’s coming from. |
I agree with you actually... what I'm suggesting is that the current situation with online teaching isn't really generalizable to long-term experiences of it, or the situation where something is planned with online teaching in mind.
I know things will vary by institution for sure, but for a lot of schools going forward they're going to try to avoid the problems you're mentioning.
My guess is even when students return, there will be things like substituting large lectures with online material, etc. Colleagues of mine at other institutions are being told that going forward training and skills in online instruction is being expected of everyone. This sounds obvious but what it means in practice is that the university probably won't find what happened this past semester acceptable.
There's a lot of issues for sure, but I don't think that the long-term experiences of online instructions can be generalized from this past semester.