Higher Ed Folks Check In

[bex1973]

Hey all - How are you all doing?  

Has your campus announced plans for Winter semester? Well, we call it Winter - the semester that starts in January (ish) LOL. Looks like we're going to stick with what we're doing now which is majority of us remote and keeping density on campus at no more than 25%.  Semester is also starting about 2 weeks later than "normal" to account for those who may travel at the holiday & then need to quarantine. 

Our students will get a couple days off at Thanksgiving time and then exclusively online for the last few weeks of the Fall semester.

Honestly we must be doing something right because we have had 17,166 folks swipe in as being on campus (this is accurate because you can't get on campus without swiping so I feel confident in the number!) but only 7 instances of a covid+ person having been on campus.  We get an email after it's been discovered/reported/known/etc and they tell us exactly what dates the person was on campus and which buildings they were in. Understandably they don't tell us the name or even if that person was student, staff or faculty. Honestly I feel really great about how our campus is working through this.

Even though our dumbass state supreme court shot down executive orders from our Governor we are still requiring face coverings on campus - YAY!

Let's hear from each other and bounce other ideas/topics around!

[Patsy Baloney]

Our campus is adding intersession classes, which is new for us. I think they’re trying to cram as much learning in as possible in the hopes that if we have to go out, students may already be done with classes or almost done by the time campus buildings may have to close.

Anyway, so far we’ve been ok. We had a pretty big cluster of students show up as covid positive last week discovered through our asymptomatic/pre-symptomatic weekly campus testing. It was tracked back to 3 events where students weren’t masked/distanced (probably parties). Student activities have been suspended, more rounds checking compliance have been added, and the discipline process is being activated for those who broke the rules.

Hopefully the numbers will trickle back down. We will have students on-campus until thanksgiving and then campus is closed to them until the spring semester.

I don’t think we’re making major changes in the spring semester. My office handles campus course evaluations and other faculty HR stuff and I’ve been informed my activities are remaining online through the academic year. I’m secretly hoping they stay that way because it’s so much easier to handle reviews for tenure, etc. this way!

ETA - I remembered a change! Our spring break will be in January as a buffer between students returning to campus and school starting. It’s so students don’t travel and bring covid back with them midway through the semester. The campus is looking for ways to support recreation during spring break for students who now won’t be leaving.

[wildrice]

Sounds like your campus is doing great!

Nothing has been formally announced for us yet. We are hoping to bring some students back to campus and may start a week later and eliminate spring break, though there has been a lot of back and forth about spring break. That would mean starting the first week of February, I believe. The plan sounds very similar to what we would have done this semester- prioritize 1st year and other students who have specific needs to be on campus (financial aid, international students, etc) but to keep the vast majority of courses online. Dorms would be single occupancy, which would reduce what we planned for fall. I don't expect staff like myself to be back on campus this academic year, but some of the staff who support students more directly would end up back on campus if we have students there. I think we'd likely be at 25% or less capacity.

My campus had planned to open for fall in a very similar fashion, but pivoted to fully online the first week of classes because we had over 100 people test positive (thankfully we were testing proactively before anyone was actually ON campus, so there was not an outbreak on campus - but there would have been had we not tested and not pivoted!).

Honestly, I'm SUPER over it. I am fine with the plan, but do not want to deal with the drama if we end up having to go fully remote again. I wish we'd just plan to stay the way we are until there is a widespread vaccine. I am tired of planning for things to be better and then changing plans when they are not. I did a ton of work to bring employees back to campus in August, though, and it was very frustrating to have that all end up being basically for nothing (even though I don't disagree with the decision that was made based on the positive tests!). So I am not ready to get back on that merry go round.

[bex1973]

I worry about our Student Involvement & Leadership folks - it's got to be really tough to only offer virtual programming.

Greek Recruitment was all virtual, I haven't heard yet how numbers shook out compared to other years.

I have no idea how to recruit Orientation Leaders

[lilypad1126]

I have no idea what our plan is. My job is admissions/recruitment, so it's not near as pressing for me since we don't have a January start. From what I've heard, though, the tentative plan is to continue on the path we are currently on (freshman, graduate/professional students on campus, most others online). We had to shut it all down and go full online for 2 weeks in mid-september, but either that actually worked and people are doing better now OR the new way our governor is counting cases means we have an artificially low number of positives. My bet is on the second scenario (huge eyerolls)

Regardless, within my unit, we've done a fabulous job of keep everyone safe. I work in a professional program, that's wholly contained (other than students have to live off-campus) and our students are handling themselves well. Shockingly, so are our faculty. But I think we'll allow staff to be remote/hybrid through most of Spring, because the overwhelming feeling is that it's working.

All of that aside, I don't think we'll have a firm decision until after the new year.

[glw]

We will continue to be 100% remote/online for intersession. There are still talks of what will happen in spring, but it's pretty much a given that we will not be having on-campus classes at all this academic year. Faculty are allowed to go in to teach from a classroom (they are set up with nice cameras, big screens, etc. and more than half of faculty are doing that.

[Cappy]

I feel like I'm living in an alternate reality. We have about 14k students on campus and over 1k cases of Covid. Testing is only for symptomatic students. They are testing at a rate of 1-5 a day. But they have a dashboard reporting "recovered" cases which assumes everyone recovers in 10 days so they report we only have 26 active cases. I'm still remote 3 days a week and my boss has requested our unit go full remote but that has been sitting for a decision for 15 days. Not holding my breath there.

Thanksgiving is when we switch to online only for students. Staff still expected to come to campus unless approved remote. Spring term pushed back to January 19th start date and no spring break. We are still waiting to hear if they bring everyone back in Jan. or if they phase that in with some disciplines starting online in a staggered fashion.

[Patsy Baloney]

Cappy, holy crap. That seems really, really negligent on your institution's part. I know people want to continue living life as normal, but that's not the way to get there (I know, I'm preaching to the choir).

I hope you and your coworkers all stay well and the cases chill out on your campus.

[bex1973]

Cappy, that's just... WOW... Yikes

[Cappy]

Oct 8, 2020 15:47:14 GMT -5 Patsy Baloney said:

Cappy , holy crap. That seems really, really negligent on your institution's part. I know people want to continue living life as normal, but that's not the way to get there (I know, I'm preaching to the choir).

I hope you and your coworkers all stay well and the cases chill out on your campus.

They had all sorts of explaining away they did at the start of the term re: that not all positive students are on-campus (as if 2 blocks away in a rental house matters) or that some students are online for classes, etc. but the lack of universal testing or sampled testing irks me. I get that the primary concern is financial. We are a mid-sized state university already on thin margins. Thankfully our students seem very compliant with masking and in my own office we are doing all student advising virtually. It's just that trust was eroded when they kept changing the reporting dashboard strategy and telling direct contacts of + students that they didn't need to test unless they had symptoms (only isolate).

[chickadee77]

Wellll our cases are starting to grow. Quickly. Our president pays lip service to all the right things, but for some reason, admin wants ALL faculty and staff back on campus regardless of medical considerations - and despite that fact that we only have about 25% of students on campus currently. They're not approving anyone to remain remote. I'm working on a plan for myself (most of the students in my caseload are 100% remote, so it makes no sense for me to drive two hours a day to sit in my office and do exactly what I've been doing at home). I think I have about a week left before making some decisions - we were told at the beginning of this that unpaid leave was an option for people not comfortable returning to campus, but so far, they've gone back on a lot of what was promised, so who knows. If unpaid leave is no longer on the table, I'll be moving on. It'll be tight at home, but we can make it work. Damn it, I love my job, though, and I can do it perfectly from home. So frustrating.

ETA: and heartbreaking for the students. If I leave, it takes our caseload from 1:675 up to 1:900. If we lose the other person I think we'll be losing for the same reason, it takes it up to a whopping 1:1350. So who really loses? This is not sustainable, and certainly not "industry" standard.

[glw]

I'm so sorry, Cappy & chickadee77. That's such an awful position to be in

[chickadee77]

Cappy, are you comfortable sharing what state you're in? If not, I understand. I don't think you're in my state, since there hasn't been a move by the BOG to move to online classes at Thanksgiving.

[just]

We're doing ok, or at least were until this week. We got 6 weeks without a case, and this week we have two without obvious transmissions. I think our protocol will reduce the impact but I'm dreading if we have to put the whole campus in lockdown.

We finish in person on 11/20 when students (who can) move home, one week online starting 11/30 and semester ends 12/4. Spring semester starts 2/22 so we have almost 3 months without students on campus. We are running a six week fully online small intersession - only 30-40 courses.

I pretty much checked out for september. I worked 30 hours a week and just kept shit at bay. I'd worked 60 - 80 hours a week from march to august 31st so I figured it was just my brain resetting. I'm back into my usual groove now though and in time to tackle the projects intersession and spring will throw at us.

[scsarah]

We're doing okay testing/positivity wise, but we also don't have a huge number of students living on campus (like pp though, they're living in apartments 2 blocks away, so....). Our county hasn't released any guidance for K-12 education yet, and we've heard they're not going to release Higher Ed guidance until after they release K-12, so we're once again in limbo. Our spring schedule is supposed to be released next Monday, and apparently the students are all sure that we'll be back, meanwhile, faculty and staff are relatively sure we won't be.

The spring plan right now is to start a week late, skip spring break, but add in "Wellness" days, where there's no classes for 1 day per month. I don't know how that will work, but ok!

I'd love to hear what your institutions are considering for fall grades though. We did P/NP, No Record and let students change grades after they got final grades in spring. It was a hot mess on the programming side, but seemed to go over well with students. This fall was supposed to be back to normal grading policy, but the students are pushing back against that something fierce. So - any indications from your schools about grading plans?

[bex1973]

scsarah, we offered Pass/Fail for Winter term but since then it's been normal - and that has been stressed repeatedly to students so they know it's not an option. They did extend the drop deadline until the end of the semester versus the normal 10th day so I think that has eased students push back.

The Wellness Days are interesting. Are they planning to rotate which day of the week that is so the instruction days work out evenly?

[lilypad1126]

scsarah, for my program, we are doing grades as normal this semester. From the webinars I've been part of, my understanding is that the vast majority of programs are doing grades as normal this fall as well. That doesn't mean the main campus won't change their minds between now and when grades come out, but they've been saying from the start that the Pass/Fail option students had in the spring was only b/c it was so rushed to move them online and that because we spent the summer figuring out how to deliver content well online, they weren't offering the Pass/Fail option for fall.

[lilypad1126]

chickadee77, I'm so sorry. What an awful position to be in.

[circa1978]

This week is the first week since opening that I'm optimistic we will make it through the semester and I think we will be ok this spring too. We haven't announced plans but it will be a late start.

I'm still working from home. Our leadership has been great about that. Overall, I think things are as good as they could possibly be given the circumstances.

[marvine]

Things have been going well, I think. Most staff are still at home, classes are hybrid. The Spring semester start date was pushed back to Feb 1 and there's no spring break. It will be so weird to have classes start so late! I don't think staff will be back on campus until sometime in the summer - since spring is still hybrid and they're trying to keep density down, they don't want the numbers taken up by staff. Our county has said that they were pleasantly surprised that our cases didn't spike when classes started, we have quite a few universities, so it was a lot of kids coming back at once.

[glw]

Oct 8, 2020 23:36:44 GMT -5 scsarah said:

So - any indications from your schools about grading plans?

We were P/F last spring and summer, but we're back to regular grading now.

[bex1973]

Oct 9, 2020 7:48:54 GMT -5 lilypad1126 said:

scsarah , for my program, we are doing grades as normal this semester. From the webinars I've been part of, my understanding is that the vast majority of programs are doing grades as normal this fall as well. That doesn't mean the main campus won't change their minds between now and when grades come out, but they've been saying from the start that the Pass/Fail option students had in the spring was only b/c it was so rushed to move them online and that because we spent the summer figuring out how to deliver content well online, they weren't offering the Pass/Fail option for fall.

This was pretty much the same message we had.  I actually haven't seen a final report with numbers of how many opted for the Pass/Fail option.  My advisors were BUSY helping students decide which route was the best for the longer term when thinking about GPA impact, pre-req minimums, program requirements, Financial Aid, etc.  And then the follow up of students who were "OH Shit" after they decided to go P/F without talking to their advisor.

I think we had going for us that a really large number of our faculty were comfortable and had some experience teaching online.

[Cappy]

Oct 8, 2020 16:39:07 GMT -5 chickadee77 said:

Cappy , are you comfortable sharing what state you're in? If not, I understand. I don't think you're in my state, since there hasn't been a move by the BOG to move to online classes at Thanksgiving.

I'm in Indiana. Just don't dox me ;-)

[sunshine608]

I've been enjoying these. I didn't realize we had so many higher ed people here!

We had been doing great but the last few weeks we have had a increase in cases and students in quarantine. Also student violating the rules is starting to increase after leveling off in September. For reference we hybrid with over half of classes completely online and our res halls are a little over half but under 3/4 full.

We have about a month left in the semester. We finish the 2nd week in November and have finals the week before Thanksgiving.

Spring was announced about two weeks ago- We start early January, no Spring Break and we end in late April. I think not giving students any time off is a recipe for disaster personally. Midterm grades are down significantly and I don't think students are doing well. 

We were also told to expect this to continue unto Fall 21. I have no idea how we will manage. Morale is down, people are worried about budget and layoff and if current operations  is sustainable that long. We are having trouble engaging the students virtually. 

[amandakisser]

We are doing exceptionally well. Students are mandated to test once per week, and out of 219k tests we've only have 110 positives so far. Our classes are flexible (students can choose, day by day, what classes they want to take in person and what classes they will do remotely) and the VAST majority of students are staying home. Plus, we have a sizeable international population that has been allowed to take classes remotely so that's helping to keep our density low.

We did push back the Winter/Spring term by one week and eliminated spring break. And my department has not returned to campus (I'm in marketing) but faculty has. I'm planning on staying remote for the long term, as I think many others are as well.

[okla]

We are doing pretty well here. Our reporting only gives us active cases, so I guess I could go add those up to get total, but the most in a week has been 5. We are mostly in-person, and the specific school I’m tied to has every class set up to Zoom. So if you have been exposed or have symptoms, you can attend via Zoom rather than feeling obligated to come in-person.

Schedule-wise, we announced plans to finish finals before Thanksgiving from the beginning, so that’s still in place. We will come back at the usual time in the spring, but the first week will be totally online, so no in-person until it’s been over two weeks since NYD. No spring break, finish classes a week early.

Cases and hospitalizations are trending up in our area, so although we haven’t seen many specifically at the university, I’m curious to see how that affects our plans.

[BeagleMama]

I like these check ins too - we're hanging in there over here, all considered.

Campus case count continue to be a few a week, we have about 2000 students living on campus. I'm genuinely surprised it hasn't imploded especially I'm in a red state with an idiot governor. Cases are steadily high state-wide.

We'll end the semester at Thanksgiving and students won't return until the end of January. Staff will be here the whole time (of course!) except for the Christmas-New Years usual break. No 2021 spring break.

They are going to do a socially distanced, small winter graduation.

[bex1973]

We had a Town Hall yesterday (virtual of course) - this is not the first one we've had and I really appreciate the attempts to make sure everyone is in the know, well as much as anyone can be in these odd times.

HR Director reminded folks that even though course delivery is changing after Thanksgiving and Winter classes start later that it's still normal work hours and "business as usual" unless time off is approved by supervisor. It just sort of struck me as funny that folks wouldn't know that but knowing her she wouldn't have said it if there hadn't been questions asked on it.

[ChillyMcFreeze]

I really appreciate these check-ins! We're doing OK now, but it was extremely rough for a few weeks. We hit the 2-week spike in late August. Nearly 25% of our students were quarantined at one point. About 9% of our student population has tested positive since June, which is fucking alarming. But at this point we're seeing *maybe* one positive per day. There must be something to the limited immunity because I know these students aren't modifying their behaviors.

Students will go home for Thanksgiving and stay home until mid-Jan. That's almost 8 weeks, so those of us in Student Affairs are feeling pretty nervous about the possibility of furloughs. We're working on virtual programming, but I don't think students will engage. I expect a large number of stop-outs after this semester from students who are frustrated with online learning.

Bonus: I've had 2 parents tell me today that the flu shot is a hoax, so that's awesome.

[bex1973]

Do y'all know about the Student Affairs Moms (SAMS) page on FB? It's great not only for information but the meme game is strong too LOL