When the coronavirus pandemic descended on college campuses last spring, Carl Zarate joined the thousands of students whose worlds shrunk abruptly from expansive lecture halls to Zoom screens. The Cal State Fullerton junior recalls taking a difficult organic chemistry exam in his bedroom at home, racing to figure out an unfamiliar online testing platform, using the Wi-Fi that he shares with his parents, grandparents, and younger sister. Zarate suspects that his professor, also a stranger to the screens that supplanted the classroom, made the test needlessly complex for fear of students cheating. “It just wasn’t ideal,” he says.
Colleges and universities across the country made the hasty transition to distance learning this spring. And as the fall approaches, with Covid-19 cases spiking in some areas and no certainty of a vaccine on the horizon, schools must confront the question of how to resume classes safely. Since physical distancing guidelines limit the number of students that can occupy one classroom, the question for many colleges and universities across the country isn’t whether to implement some form of online learning, but how.
In April, Cal State Fullerton became one of the first campuses in the country to announce plans to offer the majority of classes online in the fall. The rest of the schools in the California State University system, whose 23 campuses serve nearly 500,000 students, soon followed suit. Zarate, a premed student, says he understands the precautions his school is taking for his upcoming senior year, but he still worries about his grades and whether he’ll be able to learn online material effectively. “It makes me a little bit nervous,” he says. “How am I going to do this semester?”
Elsewhere, as the summer progresses, colleges are concretizing their plans for the fall semester. Some are enacting models that combine in-person and online instruction. The University of Texas system expects students to arrive on campus earlier in August, with up to one-fifth of all classes to be offered online. UT students will complete final exams remotely after the Thanksgiving holiday, in anticipation of a potential second wave of the virus in winter. Cornell University proposed a “library” of six options, with some distance-learning components in each scenario. Florida State University has outlined a multiphased approach, noting that educators are “exploring new and creative ways to use technology to deliver classes in a variety of alternate modes using flexible formats.”
If the official messaging sounds inconclusive and encumbered with jargon, it isn’t lost on students, who have taken to TikTok to air their frustration with their schools’ nebulous bulletins about the fall.
For their part, schools, faculty, and administrators are making decisions about reopening amid a fog of unknowns. The many unanswered questions about the coronavirus, from how it’s transmitted outdoo
