Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/10/harvard-is-telling-all-student.html
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Expect announcements like this from many many colleges and universities over the next week or so.
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Also sports: Ivy League suspending basketball games.
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What a shitty situation. How does this work for international students? What happens to their housing & meal plans that students have paid for? What about graduating seniors? That’s just…it?
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My niece tells me her teacher said there’s a 50-50 chance they’ll close her HS in the next week or so, with on-line classes and a 7AM at-home start time. My bet is that they’ll announce it by the end of the week.
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At the risk of repeating, 6 day doubling time on this beast. Everything that needs to be done needs to be done last week. Any delays are gonna render it useless. But that will not stop the dithering. Sigh.
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The board of trustees at my college just announced we’re ending face-to-face classes effective next week. Now comes the fun part where I get to figure out how the hell I’m supposed to teach a hands on class like Package Design in an online-only environment.
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My daughter is music major. That is gonna be a tough online curriculum to figure out!
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The Ohio State University has also announced that there will be no in-person classes until at least March 30. I do not believe that the students are currently on break.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article241052616.html
ETA: This makes me even more salty about them holding the Arnold Classic last week. 22K athletes from around the world, a more perfect disease vector I can’t imagine. 
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college is pretty darn expensive, are they going to get partial refunds like when your cable service goes offline?
but I love how quiet our city gets during spring and summer break, so if they want to send everyone away, 100% for it, just hoping they leave town and don’t hang out
this country is going to be so weird by the winter holidays
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They’ve already had a case at the middle school by my work, where many of my coworkers’ kids go, and they haven’t closed it yet.
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Meh. They shouldn’t even bother with having classes at Harvard. They’re all going to get jobs in finance or publishing when they graduate anyway, despite their grades.
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I’m very curious to see what happens at the middle school where I teach. We are set up for e-learning, but as an art teacher it’s going to be a challenge. I also have 300 students, and we’re supposed to do attendance based on grading their work each day, I’m wondering if I’ll end up working about 3 times as hard from home as if I were here.
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Had to go to Vassar, huh?
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I think most universities are prepared for online teaching. Professors may not be, but I’m sure the students are. And the admin must love the idea (think about how much money can be saved!). Many universities already have some sort of online learning platform (blackboard, canvas) to accompany their onsite courses. Many have required more and more content to be posted by professors on these OLPs. The uni I work at has been pushing the instructors to get trained to use the synchronous learning tools and systems (think zoom) so we can hold live, synchronous classes in case of snow days since school started in late January. The pressure really picked up last week as COVID-19 started to spread in the U.S. Most students know more about these systems than the instructors, maybe?
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I had similar thoughts. This could have a serious negative impact on students who are housing and food insecure. Maybe it’s worth it for the greater good. Hopefully Harvard is diverse enough that this is a real concern for them. Hopefully they’re smart enough to figure out a plan for those students.
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NOthing happens to them. They continue to live in the dorms. They continue to eat at campus dining. They just go out less (yeah right!) and instead of attending class in a physical classroom, they attend class online via some video conferencing system or through asynchronous online lessons.
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No, they’ve been told not to return to campus from spring break, so the question of the housing and dining costs is pertinent. It’s literally the first sentence in the post:
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