Simultaneously open and not open this fall.

But will the wave function collapse comes fall?

Yep.

quote:

Originally posted by jon-nyc:
Simultaneously open and not open this fall.

Simultaneously online and in-person.

OMG the hyflex model is Schrodinger University!

Actually, I think places like Harvard fit the bill more closely. Students are coming back, but no classes will be taught F2F. I fail to see the point. Harvard will be open, and not open.

My place, and yours, I presume, are still planning F2F for many classes. At W&M, smaller classes (like mine, of course) will be F2F. So we'll be fully open in that sense.

Yes, I know, I'm overthinking this ...

Seen on Twitter

That’s also our university’s employee Covid testing schedule!

They're not keeping us guessing, except for those of us who wonder if they're going to be able to deliver their stated plan. We're open with at least 70% of classes face-to-face. It is a mere fluke that my classes are not face-to-face, for which I am very grateful.

Yesterday, we received notification of the move-in schedule, which begins next week. If they're going to pull the plug, it'll have to happen fast and I see no signs of it. Classes don't start for two weeks after that, so moving in so early is a form of on-campus quarantine, presuming that everybody follows the rules. (Have these people never met a freshman?)

My guess is that things will go south about the time it's time to start in-person classes, and it won't just be here. I don't know what will happen next, but if the result of all of this posturing is that hundreds of thousands of people travel interstate, get exposed for a few weeks, then travel home with their newly acquired germs, historians are going to write about the stupidity of it all.

My classes are scheduled for F2F, but I'm in the process of making them MIX, which gives me the option to keep them remote for the term. I can just set the % of class meetings that are F2F equal to zero. They'll book a room for me just in case I decide to resume F2F at some time during the semester. I think I won't be alone in making this move. I'm grateful that I am being given this option.

MA, I'm glad you're not having to teach F2F.

I think I've already written that I'm signed up for hyflex, but our uni is online for the first 4 weeks. After that, if we actually return to the classroom, it seems I will have a lot more control over how many in-person sessions we have, so I'm feeling a little less concerned than I was a few weeks ago.

In the meantime, I went and got a PCR test (or what I like to call the brain-puncture test) yesterday. All employees are required to have a negative test before being allowed back on campus. If we have that, we can access our offices and also classroom tech etc. So I went and got one, and miraculously, it took all of 15 minutes (friends and colleagues who went last week were reporting waiting in the car line for four hours!)

Now for the big question -- when will I get my results!

Will Students Spread Covid-19 ...

A thoughtful take.

I got another email today reaffirming the "Everybody's moving in the dorms next week!" plan.

If my scheduling hadn't worked out this way, I could have requested to teach online. They say that 97% of those requests were allowed, but they made it really clear beforehand that only CDC-approved conditions would be approved and, at the time, even being over 65 or having diabetes weren't on the CDC list. So I don't know if the people who applied were prescreened or self-prescreened for meeting very strict criteria.

They say that there's a very strict "70% of classes in person" rule, but there have been a lot of small sections opened up to allow for social distancing, so I'm not sure how that 70% looks to people trying to register for in-person classes. I've seen some complaining on social media about availability, but that's just hearsay.

Freshmen were supposed to be able to count on ~70% of their classes being in person. (Seems like that number was 75%, but I haven't looked either of them up.)

It may be that adjuncts and graduate assistants are filling the gaps left by those approvals for online instruction.

quote:

It may be that adjuncts and graduate assistants are filling the gaps left by those approvals for online instruction.

And perhaps pre-tenure TT faculty who are too afraid to protest and are just doing what they're told. (I might know a thing or two about that...)

Well, there's that.

My tenure documents are in the hands of outside reviewers right now. When it comes time to vote in the fall, it might look bad to some of my colleagues who don't know that I didn't ask to be fully online, so that's not optimal.