Pixel Dust: College Tours Go Virtual

The New York Times: "Virtual coffees with college students for high school juniors. Zoom sessions between applicants and admissions officers. Student guides offering welcoming messages in video selfies and scenic views of university campuses captured by drones. This is what spring college tour season looks like across America, where universities are going to great lengths to show off lecture halls, green space, libraries and laboratories that have all been emptied out by the pandemic, albeit online ... Carefully planned road trips with parents have been suddenly scrapped, leaving many students to wonder how they will experience campuses’s true vibes on the internet." "Some universities are using drone images to offer 360-degree online tours. Vanderbilt University in Nashville is matching high school juniors with current students for virtual coffee meetings. Baylor University in Waco, Texas, is allowing high school students to take online courses this summer and posting dozens of selfies from faculty and students offering personal pitches for the school. The University of Virginia’s website offers virtual dormitory tours and floor plans of residence halls." "One of Yale’s Zoom presentations features a student living with her family in Singapore who stays up until nearly midnight to appear on a panel with an admissions officer living in the United States ... Web traffic has accelerated on independent sites like www.campusreel.org, which displays short, vetted videos submitted by students from 320 colleges, focusing on dorm life, tailgate parties, library study areas and cafeteria food. 'We got the washers. We got the dryers,' Yu Isii, a student at the University of California at Santa Barbara, explained on a video tour of her residence hall that included a pass through the laundry room — a scene unlikely to be included in most official tours."

Brown Prez: Campuses Must Re-Open

Christina Paxson: "The extent of the crisis in higher education will become evident in September. The basic business model for most colleges and universities is simple — tuition comes due twice a year at the beginning of each semester. Most colleges and universities are tuition dependent. Remaining closed in the fall means losing as much as half of our revenue. This loss, only a part of which might be recouped through online courses, would be catastrophic, especially for the many institutions that were in precarious financial positions before the pandemic. It’s not a question of whether institutions will be forced to permanently close, it’s how many." "Institutions should develop public health plans now that build on three basic elements of controlling the spread of infection: test, trace and separate. These plans must be based on the reality that there will be upticks or resurgences in infection until a vaccine is developed, even after we succeed in flattening the curve. We can’t simply send students home and shift to remote learning every time this happens. Colleges and universities must be able to safely handle the possibility of infection on campus while maintaining the continuity of their core academic functions." "All campuses must be able to conduct rapid testing for the coronavirus for all students, when they first arrive on campus and at regular intervals throughout the year ... Several states are working to adapt mobile apps created by private companies to trace the spread of disease, and colleges and universities can play a role by collaborating with their state health departments and rolling out tracing technology on their campuses ... Testing and tracing will be useful only if students who are ill or who have been exposed to the virus can be separated from others. Traditional dormitories with shared bedrooms and bathrooms are not adequate. Setting aside appropriate spaces for isolation and quarantine (e.g. hotel rooms) may be costly, but necessary."

Online Tools Iterate College Experience

The New York Times: "The disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic has prompted cobbled-together responses ranging from the absurd to the ingenious at colleges and universities struggling to continue teaching even as their students have receded into diminutive images, in dire need of haircuts, on videoconference checkerboards. But while all of this is widely being referred to as online higher education, that’s not really what most of it is, at least so far. As for predictions that it will trigger a permanent exodus from brick-and-mortar campuses to virtual classrooms, all indications are that it probably won’t." "There will be some important lasting impacts, though, experts say: Faculty may incorporate online tools, to which many are being exposed for the first time, into their conventional classes. And students are experiencing a flexible type of learning they may not like as undergraduates, but could return to when it’s time to get a graduate degree. These trends may not transform higher education, but they are likely to accelerate the integration of technology into it." "Real online education lets students move at their own pace and includes such features as continual assessments so they can jump ahead as soon as they’ve mastered a skill ... Conceiving, planning, designing and developing a genuine online course or program can consume as much as a year of faculty training and collaboration with instructional designers, and often requires student orientation and support and a complex technological infrastructure."