Given the range of challenges, I honestly have no idea how any school is going to effectively protect their students and faculty. With an immature student body, the ability to manage their behavior is suspect at best. Regardless of the median age of the faculty, there will be a signifcant number of at-risk professors.
Probably most disconcerting is that the physical structures of the classrooms and academic halls simply do not lend themselves to social distancing – regardless of class size. The common hallways, the 10-minute mingles between classes, small rooms with few students sharing the same air for up to 80 minutes or large auditoriums with fairly spaced seating…how do you organize this safely?
Roll these challenges into the community make-up and everything gets turned on its head. It’s one thing to be in Lafayette, IN where Purdue claims the median age of the population is in the 20’s. It’s another when the school is in a town where the two largest populations are retirees and tourists.
There is no way to ignore the emotional desire to get back to normal, but to try to force it and rationalize it without completely overhauling the operational delivery is simply not going to work.
How can any school can go back without re-imagining their peopled spaces? It might mean requiring everyone to adapt their schedules to 3-shift operations where like it or not, everyone – students, faculty, staff, and admin – will have to take a graveyard shift at some point during the week.
As far as instruction goes, schools must develop dual-delivery systems so that single classes can be split into 2 or 3 sections with rotating cohorts. For example, a single M-W-F class of 15 could be offered live to 5 different students each day with instruction by the professor, with another 5 getting live instruction in another time slot from a GA, and the other 5 getting it remote. Each day, the 5 would rotate so that every student would see the professor live at least once a week. This is one idea, this is one scenario. What other options are there to offer live instruction while mitigating the risk?
This classroom challenge will also be true for every single aspect of college life – from dining halls to the residence halls to the college commons – and without addressing each space, how can there be a safe way to go back to school.
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