Okay. So we are now on record. My first question for you is, well, seeing us How can out of 346 of your school's courses I believe we're in person this fall. How many of the courses offered by subsea spring will be taught in person.
The exact number but it's about double. Oh well. For the courses that were taught.
And, and why is that
why did we propose so many more face to face courses. Yeah. The, the focus of many or most of the majors at census are science based courses, and they require laboratories to really have the full experience in the course. And I guess this is the reason why we have some many more that we proposed because the fall semester but the fact that we were mostly remote we pushed many of these laboratory courses off kick the can down the road as it was. And so, the spring semester, you know, we had this backlog of courses that really needed to be taught in person. Another key part of of the sets core curriculum is experienced based education. And many of the or not many but a few of these lab courses are required to complete this core learning goal of the school. And so that's another reason why we were forced, if at all possible to offer these courses face to face. The third reason is that we actually had a very good experience with the courses in the fall. There were no mishaps. Students were responsible, that they followed the, the rules for for social distancing. The instructors reported very positive outcomes of the courses. And so we thought it was potentially possible to offer these face to face courses in a safe way. Now, you know that there's always the failsafe here which is if that problems occur. Then the course would have to give it to the, to the remote environment, and all of the instructors that propose the face to face courses were made aware of this. So they needed to plan. In addition to offering face to face course with proper social distancing, they needed to plan for a pivot to remote environment. And so I think they're, you know they're prepared for it prepared for a more, they're prepared for a difficult semester. In the spring, if it happens.
Yeah, I guess with the second wave that we're currently in. There's
another thing is that at the time that we're proposing the courses which is more than a month ago we weren't yet in the second wave. But it appears to have materialized now so you know we we have this in the back of our mind and prepared to pivot to remote if necessary.
He has to know if any sub students have contracted COVID. At this point, like,
face to face course. Yeah. Not to my knowledge. That's good. Part of the part of the difficulty was this. The decision by the university, not to require testing for the students taking face to face courses, I still can't understand the rationale for that, because all the students graduate students and laboratories, working in laboratories, they all need to be needed to get tested weekly. And there we in fact even have undergraduate student students doing internship projects in laboratories, they need to get tested, weekly, but the face to face students, it was decided didn't need to get tested. And so, for some of the courses where the instructors felt that it really was necessary to get to get the testing for their students. They applied for this. And, got it. so not all of the courses had weekly testing producing face to face students on Sunday. So, you know, the ones that didn't get tested. We don't know. They didn't get tested so we don't know whether they were ever positive or not. I don't think there. There are no absolutely no documented cases of transmission in the glasses.
It's kind of strange though that they don't. There's no requirement to be tested by the universe.
I don't understand the rationale, and it really wasn't, you know, the only thing that we were told was that that the risk was low for these students. Of course, this wasn't the explanation really wasn't didn't go over well with the instructors for the courses and the department chairs because they're all scientists. So, just to say that the risk is low without an explanation for why this is the case. And this is why, in fact, they, they, independently sought permission to get tested. I think in almost all of the cases they will.
Sir, it's really like any group that's forming to try to push, like a requirement from a university to get tested for all these classes are not really
my understanding is actually there's a committee called the EEOC don't actually know what the with acronym stands for but they're the ones that make this decision. And the EEOC has decided that in the string, or the face to face students will get tested weekly. So I think they probably took into consideration, many complaints requests for testing for individual classes. There was a little bit chaotic I have to say, because you know the instructors were worried. And we ultimately figured out a way that we could request them independently.
I see. Um, if you don't mind like switching gears a bit to like the rope remote construction aspect of subs for the spring. Are there any specific plans to further improve remote instruction for your school or district.
Yes. So, you know, there, there are a lot of. There were a lot of. Well first of all, I should say that we have a cadre of faculty that are quite experienced in remote instruction, these are the faculty that were pioneers in producing online courses. So we had this amazing resource available in the faculty. And what we did was to organize them into a group called the online mentors. So they offered individual consultations with faculty that weren't that abama technology and the theory behind. Teaching remote courses. And that turned out to for the fall semester turned out to be amazingly positive. The online mentors also created a Canvas site with resources. And that was also very helpful. We this we are partnered with C tar and also with. What's the name of that organization the DLT. They helped out with creating these this list of resources for faculty, but I think it was the individual work with faculty members by the by this group of online mentors that really turned out, and I've gotten feedback from a number of faculty that said that they couldn't they couldn't imagine having to so quickly produced the online, the remote course without the help of online mentors. So, now, this is not. So the next thing I'm going to tell you isn't. I can't say that it's directly correlated with the, with the organization of these online members. We did a midcourse survey of all such courses. And I can send you the results if you would like. The results of the midcourt survey but the courses our remote courses were thought I'm very highlighted by the by students Chico wasn't as if they were, you know, saying, Oh, you did a good. You did a good. You made a good effort, but, you know, we could still. Of course when it really wasn't up to standard they really like the courses and the way they were delivered. So I don't know whether there's a direct correlation between the results of that survey and the online methods, but I'd like to take that probably is.
It seems that we. Yes, I would like to see the results of the survey. Thank you.
I'll be happy to show you the summary, or do you want actually the results, the raw data,
both, but that's all right. Okay. Um,
so for the spring semester. We, you know the online mentors group is, is still active. In fact, I'm still getting requests from faculty you know put me in contact with one of my online mentors. And so I think what we're doing for the spring really is just a continuation of what we've done in the fall, which is to provide the tools up for faculty to be able to teach their courses remotely. And so that the TLT and C car they had resources but problem that our faculty were having with those resources, is that it was a little bit like going to the cereal Island supermarket right they were offering, so many different options, without, without something firm and that you know that you should choose this one because this is the best tool for the, for the project. Maybe that's because you know that they didn't have a good handle on what the right tool is especially not knowing the subject area of the individual courses. But the online mentors actually I think we're promoting the tools that they use that they successfully use in their courses. And so this you know eliminated this very important first step which is where the faculty member needs to needs to decide on what tools, they're going to use to produce to offer their off their remote course. So the simplified things for that. And I think that was very important.
And so, so with the teaching experience that the online mentors have, they can more like suggest resources that are particularly relevant to
what I was trying to do was because I had a pretty good idea, a faculty member requested help from an online mentor, I was the one that was doing the matchmaking. And so I would connect them with an online mentor that was in the same approximately the same area so they would have a better understanding of what the appropriate tools would be.
It sounds like a good system.
It was, it worked out extremely well. I thought
you guys there's no need to you know fix what isn't broken for the following semester.
Well, you know, we don't have any evidence that the online metrics that any harm. And from everything that I know the survey and actually individual conversations with faculty members. It looks as if it was positive. So, let's move ahead and see whether we can do better in the spring semester. Cool.
You don't mind me just asking. One more question just about whether like the nature of online courses like well subs have more synchronous classes or asynchronous classes in the spring.
I don't have. I can't give you that number.
That's fine.
And actually, you know the the categories are a little bit complicated. It's not a question of whether it's purely synchronous or asynchronous in most cases. I can tell you about my course. I teach molecular genetics. And my intention was that that's ongoing now. So in the summertime when I was deciding what category to choose. I initially chose a synchronous because in my discussions with online mentors, I realized that, you know, this is the most appropriate way to engage students in an online learning but then if you choose a synchronous remote instruction. It means that the meeting times if you want to any are going to have to be by arrangement. There are no established meeting times right. That's, that's the, the, the scheduling offices definition of asynchronous. And what I wanted to do was that the material was provided to the, to the students and then we would meet in a kind of a recitation session where the students could ask questions for clarification of subject matter. And so I realized, although I had designed my course as a synchronous, and my course actually has 145 students in it so I thought, well, it's going to be very difficult to get all of them to agree on a time that they could meet. I then had to switch to synchronous designation, just so that I would have an established meeting time that I could use for the rest of patients. So although my class is mostly asynchronous. It was in the synchronous category ultimately for the reasons I just told you. So I don't know that a synchronous or synchronous really has much meaning, other than the fact that if the scheduling office will not schedule a meeting time. If it's a sacred. And they will schedule a meeting time. If it's sacred.
Just, just to have that recitation for some cloud.
We have a large class. You're better off. Choosing synchronous so that you will have an ability to have all the students agree on a specific meeting time.
They see. I just took like one clarifying question about such plants in general, are they. Better still, something's been worked out in terms of like in person and remote instruction protocol, stuff like that. Or is it pretty much like said,
We are pretty much set at this point, the only the only thing that we're going to introduce actually is that we're going to have a meeting of all of the faculty who are teaching the pistol face courses. Because, you know, we want to have the fall semester was a little bit chaotic, in terms of you know things decisions about testing and not testing protocols for social distancing and so what we're going to do is to have a meeting of all those faculties so that we can all get on the same page. And, you know, and do things in a consistent way
like more uniform guidelines with subs courses.
Right. I mean, that's what we attempted to do in the fall, but because of all the mixed messages we were getting it wasn't exactly the smoothest. I would say it's, it wasn't it wasn't as smooth as we would have liked it to be, you know, there are a lot of considerations that just, for example let's say that that a student has a face to face class. And then immediately afterwards, they're going to have to meet for a remote class, they won't have time to travel home after they leave their face to face class in order to attend their remote class. So what do you, where do the students go. You know, there, there are no we didn't have any established meeting rooms or, you know, they couldn't go to libraries for example. And so what we're setting up is actual rooms in a number of buildings where the face to face class. Classes are being held, where the students can sit have internet access so they can do their remote glass. While still on campus. And we only realized this difficulty after the fall semester began and kind of. We did this. We set up these rooms in an uncoordinated way so for the spring semester at least it's going to be much more coordinated.
That's your. That's your school school in general then for the spring semester, you know like more coordination smoother operations for students and staff.
That's right.
Got it. Um.
Another thing that that I'm really hoping for is, and I mentioned this to a number of faculty already, is that there there's a huge demand for online classes from our students, and sometimes even a normal semester. Students will prefer. And maybe you could tell me whether whether this is true for you but sometimes they prefer an online class at least one or two of them during the semester, but they can do from the comfort of the dorm room, or whatever wherever housing that they had far off campus. And, you know, we, we didn't have a huge number of these courses and so now the faculty have spent a great deal of effort in developing online courses I know I did for mine from my molecular genetics class. So I'm thinking maybe this is an opportunity to, you know, provide better service to students. Perhaps if we can establish true online courses for some of these remotely taught classes
to give students the option. I think there's the need, there's a demand and the need.
So I'm hoping that faculty will take this seriously and use the work that they've already done in in creating their remote class to propose the class to our curriculum committee and see if they approve it as a, as a true online course.
Not just like
seeing the silver lining in the, in the COVID crisis.
Yeah, just like, not just treating online classes as a COVID temporary temporary measure.
Right. When you get lemons, make lemonade. They say
that sums up my questions.
Alright, so you're going to be writing an article for the topic.
Yep, just, um, about how each school is dealing with, or making plans for the spring semester with courses in everything.
I have a chance to take a look at the article before it goes live.
Unfortunately we don't allow people to like review the article before we publish it, but if you have any thing that you think should be corrected. After it's published you can let me know through email and I'll bring it up with our editors.
Sounds good.
Yep. Well,
the article is going to include all of the schools.
Um, that's, that's my hope. I don't know, every school respond in time, but that's that's the hope Yeah,
some important information for your article.
You definitely have Thank you. Thank you for your time. Okay. Hope you have a good rest of your week, Tom,