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NPR Education
6 Ways Universities Are Responding To Coronavirus
Anya Kamenetz
March 6, 2020
So far just a few U.S. higher education students have confirmed
exposure to COVID-19, mainly through contact with patients in
hospitals. There are no outbreaks centered on campuses, and young
people as a group appear less susceptible to the disease.
But higher education in the United States is more of an international
community than ever, and that means the effects of the coronavirus have
been felt broadly across the country already. On Sunday, the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention said colleges should "consider"
canceling both study-abroad and foreign-exchange programs, which could
potentially affect hundreds of thousands of students.
Almost 1 million of the nation's more than 19 million higher education
students come from overseas, according to the Institute of
International Education. China is the largest point of origin for those
students, with about 370,000 students currently enrolled. Of the other
highly affected countries, South Korea is No. 3 , Japan is No.8, and
Iran is No. 13 in sending students to the U.S.
At the same time, 342,000 students from the U.S. study abroad each
year, according to IIE. The second-most popular destination is Italy,
which, because of widespread community transmission there, now carries
a CDC travel warning.
Here are the top ways colleges and universities are coping with the spread of coronavirus:
1. Moving classes online
Amy DeCillis, a senior at NYU Shanghai, chose to stay in-country to
finish out her last semester. She says she's been largely confined to
her apartment complex, getting groceries delivered and taking classes
online with classmates across several time zones. When she ventured out
to a restaurant recently, she had to get her temperature checked at the
door. And she has temporarily adopted the cat of an absent classmate.
"I'm a dog lover, but I have a COVID-cat now," she says.
U.S.-based institutions with operations on the ground in China and
Japan — including Temple University, NYU, Fort Hays State University
and Sam Houston State University — had just a few weeks to migrate all
their classes online after cities came under quarantine. And colleges
and universities around the United States are now asking professors to
prepare to do the same, and to familiarize themselves with video
conferencing programs like Zoom, in the event that an outbreak keeps
students confined at home.
In China, some schools are making courses accessible over mobile phone,
because students may be stuck at home without laptops. And taking
classes online can mean using a VPN to get around China's firewall.
Heather Lee, a professor of history at NYU Shanghai, says, "The VPN
makes things really difficult." Because of bandwidth issues, she often
resorts to using the popular Chinese messaging app WeChat to
communicate with her students during online lectures.
Jeff Bourgeois, a leadership professor at Fort Hays State, has gone
from teaching students on their partner campus in Henan Province,
China, to teaching them from 16 time zones away in San Diego. He says
he can't travel to China; meanwhile, his China-based students are
quarantined at home.
"I asked one of my students the other day, 'What have you been up to?'
And his response was, 'Today, I took a shower. I watched a movie. And
then I took a nap. Tomorrow I'll probably do the same thing.'"
Bourgeois says as the semester gets going, "I'm hoping they fill their
time with lots of homework and writing beautiful papers."
Jeff Lehman, vice chancellor at NYU Shanghai, says there has been one
silver lining: "We have, as a faculty, been thinking more seriously
about pedagogy in the last month than we have in the prior eight
years." He says lecturing over video chat isn't always feasible because
of bandwidth issues and other reasons, so professors are figuring out
how to engage students by posting videos and over chat threads.
He and leaders at other colleges say that lessons learned, and plans
created, for their Chinese operations may become applicable stateside
if the coronavirus continues to spread.
2. Canceling travel
Even before the CDC's advisory about study abroad, many colleges and
state university systems began canceling both ongoing and upcoming
travel programs. Among them: the University of California system,
Arizona State University, University of Pittsburgh, Edinboro
University, James Madison University, University of Connecticut,
Trinity College and Texas A&M University. Those cancellations have
meant scrambling to find new spots for students on crowded campuses.
Lehman at NYU says that after the school's Chinese New Year break, with
coronavirus looming, hundreds of Shanghai students chose to go study on
different campuses: "The No. 1 destination, ironically, was Florence.
And so actually, a number of those students have had a double bump
experience. But they're troupers."
Faculty, meanwhile, have been affected by cancellations of major
meetings and academic conferences like Educause in Bellevue, Wash., and
a meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver. Science magazine
reported that researchers as far away as Berkeley, Calif., are feeling
the loss of ability to collaborate with colleagues in China.
3. Helping Chinese students
On Thursday, the Institute of International Education released a survey
of 234 U.S. institutions that together enroll about half of all Chinese
students in the United States. Of those, 37% said some of their
students were forced to remain in China after traveling home for the
holidays because of virus-related travel restrictions. The universities
have been offering these students the chance to do independent study,
take a semester off or enroll online.
For Chinese students currently on American campuses, the problem is the
reverse: They can't go home for spring break, or possibly for the
summer. The survey found institutions are offering special counseling
services and, in some cases, hotlines to report instances of
discrimination.
In addition, three-fourths of institutions surveyed said travel
restrictions are affecting their ability to recruit students in China
for upcoming years.
4. Issuing warnings and guidelines
Across the country, universities are trying to calm students, faculty
and parents; 96% told IIE in their survey that they have released
communitywide communications and basic health information. Students and
staff coming back from overseas — and sometimes, anyone with symptoms —
are being urged to self-quarantine for two weeks. Campus health centers
are asking for a heads up if a student with symptoms believes they need
to be tested for COVID-19. And professors are being reminded to
encourage students to stay home if they feel sick, and not to require a
doctor's note.
In addition to health warnings, hand-washing reminders and cleaning
tips, a common thread in campus communications about coronavirus has
been to "take an active role in rejecting xenophobia, bigotry and
racism associated with COVID-19," as the University of California,
Davis put it.
5. Planning for bigger disruptions
For Ruth Chisum, executive director of online operations at Sam Houston
State University in Texas, the coronavirus threat has meant dusting off
their "academic continuity plan" from Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
SHSU exemplifies the complex nature of higher education today: The
public college near Houston serves about 20,000 students and has 51
online programs. It also happens to run a dual-degree program with
Zhejiang Police College in Hangzhou, China. The program swiftly
converted to online-only after the coronavirus began to spread.
When it comes to their main campus, Chisum says, "We're going to wait
and see what the CDC says — what sort of mandate we receive from our
federal agencies. However, it's not a passive posture in the sense that
we are preparing ourselves for the possible transition of moving all of
our campus-based operations to an online modality."
During Harvey, Chisum says the school closed the main campus for only
one week. However, knowing that its online students, often working
parents, were facing significant life disruptions, SHSU delayed the
start of the online semester until October, crunching its usual 15-week
courses into 7.5-week intensives. Chisum says they'd probably do
something similar in the case of coronavirus closures, since students
mostly stayed on track after Harvey and revenue didn't drop as much as
expected.
6. Teaching and learning about coronavirus
A global health crisis can also be a learning opportunity. In
mid-February, the Imperial College London debuted a free class on the
online learning platform Coursera, titled "Science Matters: Let's Talk
About COVID-19." The course already has more than 7,000 enrollments,
making it the second most popular Coursera offering so far in 2020.
As for Amy DeCillis at NYU Shanghai, she has shifted her capstone
senior project to be about coronavirus and her own quarantine
experience. She says she's not sorry she stayed through the quarantine:
"I'm content with my decision. It sounds cheesy, but I'm learning so
much about life, and friendship, and the world, and myself in the
process."
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