Desperate, like many colleges, to keep their doors open and thus their enrollments up, UT has pushed us all back into the classroom. Masks are mandatory, as are social distancing; the two classrooms I've been assigned to this semester each has 11 desks for students, while my course caps are 20-22.
We've been encouraged to teach the class to half the students in person, and stream it to the half that aren't present, but to me that sounds as awful as all get out. Who wants to watch a livestream of an in-person class? Who wants to be an in-person class where the professor is constantly looking at Zoom? So I've decided to have half my class in the room on Wednesday, and the other half on Friday-- but I don't stream it to the half that's not there, I just repeat the same content across the two days. I make up for this by assigning homework due at the end of the week, accounting for the "missing third day," though I encourage them to get it done for the day they don't come to class.
Then, I do a Zoom class with the entire section on Mondays. This lets me see all the students at once; it also lets me see anyone who can't come to class in person. Across my three sections, I have two students with "remote learning accommodations" (both are overseas), but in addition, the class has to allow for students who are on campus but can't/won't come to an in-person class for temporary periods. So far I have two students who have informed me of positive COVID-19 tests, a few more who have told me their roommates tested positive so they self-isolated, and one who said her and her suitemates were spooked enough by how quickly it is spreading through the student body that they voluntarily decided to isolate themselves for two weeks. (Students who can't come to class get alternate work to do, usually involving watching a video of me lecturing, in lieu of the Wednesday/Friday class.)
It's all a bit of a muddle, exacerbated by an irregular schedule for the first few weeks (we started on a Wednesday, then the third week included Labor Day, which supposedly we were supposed to make up by having class on a Saturday(!)), by the fact that every professor is handling the room caps differently (from talking to my students, most do seem to be live-streaming to non-present students), by starting a week early so that we can end by Thanksgiving (one of my students didn't know we had changed the start date of the semester until she got to campus and learned she had missed a week of class), and by the fact that every student is of course online on a different day for a different professor (one of my students has a thirty-minute commute, and has an on-line class for a different professor immediately prior to my in-person class).
The Dean sent us an e-mail complaining parents were confused (what parents think doesn't seem like something we should worry about in college, but whatever), but I don't think this is because of poor communication. Students are confused because it is confusing! If you're in your first semester (as most of my students are), college is already confusing; imagine adding "hybrid" courses on top of all that.
I think it's going to be hard to build rapport. I don't get to see more than ten students at a time; some days just five depending on how groups break down and who is absent. Classes that small are always tricky in a gen ed, as it's hard to create a critical mass of invested students whose investment spreads to the others; if you have three or four apathetic or even just quiet students, that could be over half the room! I only get to see any given student in person for about an hour a week... and they have a mask on, stymieing my already mediocre name-learning ability. (We are required to make seating charts for contact tracing, though, so that turned out to have an unexpected upside.)
Because of scheduling, I've only taught one Zoom class so far, but to my surprised it was kind of better than the in-person class. I had twenty students, so there was a good critical mass, and enough of them were engaged enough to keep it going. (I did not have to talk to twenty black screens, thank God.) Plus, you can do group work and circulate on Zoom... which thanks to social distancing, I can't do in person!
It's going to be an odd semester. I am almost certainly going to screw it up. Or rather, I already have.
Will we make it through? My university's COVID dashboard puts us at 24 total cases by the end of week two, but my suspicion is a lot of positive tests came in over this weekend that will show a big jump when it is updated later today. Every weekend we get a global e-mail from the Dean of Students reminding students of the harsh consequences for hosting or attending a party. I am not sure how many of my students take it seriously, but even if it's just 10% who don't, that's only two in each of my classes... but over 800 overall, which seems more than enough to generate and spread a critical mass of COVID infections...
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