About an hour after I last posted, Carleton’s president emailed the campus with the announcement we’d all been sort of expecting anyway: Carleton’s moving all instruction online through at least Midterm Break in early May, and likely beyond.
The complete details, as one might imagine, are still very much in flux. Because how could they not be? We’re all in uncharted territory here. But what we do know: Finals end as planned today. Students have an extra day (until Wednesday) to vacate campus. Students can petition to stay if they really can’t leave, and we’ll have services to support them. Spring break’s extended by a week, until April 6, to help faculty and staff reconfigure courses and course support for online learning. Spring term will end on time, and be a week shorter than a normal spring term.
Everyone’s a little lost, and everything feels off right now. My extended Friday office hours were part instruction and part informal therapy session. I invited students to just show up even if they didn’t have questions if they felt unmoored and like they needed to be around others, and a few took me up on that, sitting and working or listening while I answered others’ questions. Some of my senior advisees are scrambling to graduate early, because they can, and I’ve been helping them navigate the ad-hoc accelerated process and think through their options.
We started immediately as a department thinking through some of the practical aspects of moving computer science instruction online, and have already agreed on some common tools to use and/or test drive before April 6. It’s certainly helped that many companies who provide online learning tools are moving to make those free to educators and students during this time. We arrived quickly at the minimum technical configuration our students need to have to participate remotely, which will help ITS plan to provide resources to students who need them. My chair has been an absolute rock star in all of this: attentive to the myriad details while still taking time to make sure we’re all comfortable in our teaching assignments and keeping us talking to each other. And our technical associate’s been working overtime to help us figure out the technical details of things like remote access to servers and other department resources. I feel as though we’re ahead of the curve as far as department preparedness goes.
This week, Grading All The Things and wrapping up winter term are my priorities, as well as making sure my kids, who are now on extended spring break through the end of the month, are not killing each other and/or spending 12 hours a day on screens. I have a ton of administrative tasks that fell off of last week’s to-do list when the announcement hit, that must get done this week. So any planning for spring at this point will be during those down moments when my mind wanders, or perhaps as a break from grading to quell my building anxiety. Next week, planning begins in earnest, and I hope to chronicle my thoughts and plans here as I, and we, navigate this new, strange normal.
How are you, and your institution, navigating your new normal?
This is what a computer scientist looks like 