Schools and Universities move classes online to deal with coronavirus outbreak

guest · Oct 25, 2020

One professor's obsessive quest to replicate the university classroom experience from his home studio
October 22, 2020
https://edscoop.com/sean-willems-home-studio-university/

When the image of Sean Willems comes in over Zoom, he’s ebullient, sharp and engaging — not as much as he would be in person, but that’s not an option right now.
And when he was told in April, as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that classes would go fully online for the summer, he devised a plan to preserve as much of the in-class experience for his students as possible.

As Willems delineates in a paper published on his website, he threw himself into the project for reasons of curiosity — “pushing the boundaries of what a home studio is capable of doing,” he wrote — and a recognition that the default technologies available to educators, of consumer webcams and laptop microphones, are not reasonable replacements.
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The universities where professors have resigned themselves to these common tools are the same that stake their reputations on claims of being world-class learning institutions.

In sharing his paper with other professors, Willems said he hopes to encourage others to do as he’s done, and several other professors have built their own home studios based on his advice. It doesn’t have to cost thousands of dollars, he said, and his paper outlines a basic set-up that he said costs about $800 and can vastly improve the quality of any online class.

“To me, the students have invested, they want to learn, they want to come do it, so it makes it fully worth it to make the investment,” he said.
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guest · Dec 10, 2020

How higher education leaders tried to stave off disaster in 2020
December 7, 2020
https://edscoop.com/how-education-leaders-tried-to-stave-off-disaster-in-2020/

Despite a few moments that might be called relative successes, a year spent scaling new technologies to serve entire campuses, ensuring equal access to technology among students and staff and protecting institutional health, all while trying to maintain academic quality, has left higher education leaders feeling constantly at the edge of disaster.

Several college and university leaders told EdScoop that, much like other sectors, higher education has had to continue to improvise and innovate as a year dominated by a deadly, costly pandemic has continued to unravel.
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Small victories
“I think the key word in 2020 has been uncertainty,” said Kevin Davis, chief information officer at Davidson College in North Carolina. “And flexibility and agility in making decisions and taking to light new information and adjusting how we operate.”

The switch to online learning was largely successful at Davidson, Davis said. Faculty received training to adapt their classes and the school was able to scale technologies like virtual conferencing software and learning management tools to its nearly 2,000 students quickly thanks to a pre-existing cloud environment, he said.
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The pandemic has also forced faculty and staff to think creatively about how to deliver education and engage students with learning, Uhlenkamp said.
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