As the fall approached and colleges considered what impact Covid-19 would have on their campuses, some of them settled on a solution: an altered academic calendar.
Many made adjustments like delaying the start of the semester for a couple of weeks or moving classes online after Thanksgiving to keep students at home. But a number of small liberal-arts colleges did something more radical: They cut their semester into halves, on the idea that navigating two courses at a time — albeit at a much quicker pace — would be logistically and intellectually easier for students than juggling four at once.
Now, with one semester under their belts, these colleges are looking back on what they learned. The experiment with the academic calendar came with its share of stress. But as often happens with innovations that emerge in response to a crisis, it also sparked other changes — in this case, to central elements of course design and teaching — that were less obviously connected to the logistics of the class schedule.
The pandemic forced professors to strip teaching down to the essentials.
Many of the colleges believe their decision to break up the semester in the midst of the pandemic was the right one, says Eric Boynton, provost and dean of Beloit College, which was among the first to convert to modules, or “mods” as many now call them. He helped organize a conference this month in which about 20 institutions that had transitioned to modules gathered virtually to talk about the experience.
Among the virtues of splitting up the semester: Colleges that went fully remote were relieved that students didn’t have to shoulder four online courses simultaneously. Those that taught in person could safely socially distance because only half as many classes as usual were in session. Others that enroll a substantial number of international students say time-zone differences were easier to manage with a smaller course load. Still others found that five days a week of contact between students and professors allowed people to form closer bonds and helped mitigate the alienating aspects of social distancing, including masks and the use of videoconferencing.
At the same time, when considering whether they want to continue with the shorter, more intense schedule post-Covid, many say no. Teaching at such a rapid clip, they found, is exhausting, makes it hard for students to catch up if they fall behind, and can inhibit learning.
“To quote Churchill, Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others,” says Boynton. “Mods is the worst delivery module in the time of Covid except for all the others.”
Focusing on What Matters
One potentially longer-term benefit, many say, is that professors had to ask themselves: What really matters in this course and what do I want students to get out of it? The transition to abbreviated terms ramped up training and campus conversation around effective teaching and learning.
“Being forced to experiment in a sense was, I hate to say ‘exciting,’ but it made my brain work in ways it hasn’t had to,” says Katrina Phillips, an assistant professor of history at Macalester College.
Like many professors, Phillips spent the summer reimagining her courses to make them adaptable to online teaching, such as videotaping her lectures in order to create a “flipped” classroom, in which students watch the video beforehand and spend class time in discussion.
But because of the shorter terms, she also had to strip her teaching down to the essentials. What did she absolutely need to cover in “American Indian History to 1871,” for example, given that she only had 7.5 weeks to do so?
Because she is the only professor on campus teaching Native history, Phillips says the hardest part was knowing she had to let go of some content. To compensate, she asked her students to collaborate on a timeline of key events, something that proved hugely successful. Not only did students cover material she could not get to in her lectures, they learned from one another, as each focused on historical events that meant something to them.
As to whether students learned as much, or as effectively, in the shorter terms, Phillips says it’s hard to know because of other limitations created by the pandemic.
Boynton says that was a common refrain at the conference. “One of the topics of this meeting was, How do you assess this thing? No one really can,” he says. “It’s hard to disentangle mods from Covid from online from no breaks in the semester. It made for this pressure-cooker atmosphere.”
Karine Moe, Macalester’s provost and dean of the faculty, says that when she’s asked professors and students what they thought of the shorter terms, views were mixed. And sometimes what people complained about had more to do with the pandemic, like having to stare at screens for hours on end.
“I think we made the best choice we could in a very hard situation. The module plan allowed us to pivot, to have as much in-class instruction as we were able to. It contributed to low Covid cases on campus.”
Deeper Changes
At Mount Holyoke College, professors and administrators faced two key challenges: More than a quarter of their students are international — including many from China — and the college remained online this year. That meant that students were learning together but in vastly different time zones.
As at many of the colleges that switched to modules, faculty members were given a lot of discretion in how to teach their courses. Aside from meeting federal and accreditation requirements for contact hours and course hours, professors could determine how much and how frequently to meet synchronously and asynchronously, says Elizabeth Markovits, associate dean of the faculty and director of the campus teaching and learning center at Mount Holyoke.
Some professors might come up with a weekly schedule: Mondays are for videotaped lectures, Tuesdays are for live discussions, Wednesdays are for one-on-one meetings, and so on. “We wanted to give faculty the autonomy to make their choices,” she says. “Dance class is going to look very different from an upper-level English seminar.”
While faculty and student reactions were all over the map, Markovits noticed a few patterns. First-year students seemed to adapt the easiest, probably because they had nothing to compare it to. And pre-tenure and visiting faculty members got particularly involved in revamping their courses. About a third of the faculty decided to teach the same material as always, just at double the pace, she says. The rest were willing to rework their courses, and those that did tended to report better outcomes.
“I talked to one scientist who said, ‘I’ve known I should have flipped my classroom for years. But I never had time.’” she says. “It’s not like we had time to undertake major curriculum renovation, but what was the choice?”
When attending the conference on modules, Markovits was struck by how many campuses reported that there was widespread faculty engagement around course design. Mount Holyoke doesn’t plan to continue with mods in the fall, but she can see the benefits it has brought to the campuses that have tried it.
“It really has created this community of teachers,” she says. “We talk about teaching in a way that we have never done, in such a sustainable, deep way.”
One common element to teaching at an accelerated pace, several faculty and administrators say, has been a shift toward inclusive teaching. That might mean, for example, breaking assignments down into smaller components, and spelling out expectations in greater detail. Professors say this has been helpful in keeping students on track when the fast pace leaves little room for procrastination or stumbling.
A surprise benefit, says Renae Brodie, a professor of biological sciences at Mount Holyoke, is that all of her students in an upper-level behavioral ecology course performed better. Normally, says Brodie, she might have a few superstars in each class. This year, she saw a higher level of quality in all of the assignments, spread out more evenly among the students.
She attributes that to the fact that she reduced the number of projects from five to three but asked students to dive more deeply into each one. Because students spent time revising their work, with more immediate and intensive feedback from her instead of moving on to the next project, she says, everyone’s writing and research skills improved.
Like a lot of professors, particularly those in STEM fields, she worries about the longer-term impact of learning under Covid. If students are learning less content, as many are, even at campuses that have retained the semester system, will that hurt them next year or the year after? She doesn’t know the answer yet but is grateful for the chance to rethink her teaching this year.
“The mod system was hard — really hard to do. But it really forced you to look at your course and say, What is absolutely core?” she says. “Every frill had to come off. If you couldn’t justify something or it was repetitious, it had to go.”
Mods May Stick Around
Looking ahead, some colleges are keeping mods on the table, possibly because the pandemic will still be affecting college campuses into the fall.
“It remains an open question” at Bates College, says Joshua McIntosh, vice president for campus life. While everyone has been exhausted by the intensity of modular teaching, he says, if physical-distancing requirements remain, then it might need to continue. The alternative would be adding classes at night and on weekends.
Other campuses say they could see incorporating modules in some form, even after they revert to semesters. At Beloit, for example, two professors might be able to team-teach an interdisciplinary class, says Boynton, by combining two mods into one semester-long course. Others have talked about how short, immersive terms are particularly well suited for community-based learning, where students benefit from spending time together on projects outside the classroom.
Community colleges have a longer history with short-term courses, in part to accommodate the schedules of working adults who may find eight weeks manageable but 15 weeks unworkable. Four-year colleges that enroll a lot of students with outside obligations might find mods similarly useful.
Travis Frampton, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Schreiner University, a small, Hispanic-serving institution in Texas, says he was struck by how many academically strong students ended up dropping some of their courses last spring, after the pandemic hit. Sent back home, sometimes into chaotic circumstances, students had to take on additional family responsibilities, making it harder to keep up with multiple courses.
That was one reason Schreiner broke its semester into two terms this year, he says, and may be an argument for keeping that system even after the pandemic is under control. This fall, student grades were up over all and the number of D’s, F’s and withdrawals was down. Many students seemed to like the more flexible, concentrated schedule, he says. “Our students did not fail in the eight-week Covid environment.”
While it’s ultimately a decision that will be made in consultation with faculty, Frampton is optimistic that shorter terms can play a role in undergraduate education. “Let’s give this a shot. It not only helps students with learning outcomes and concentration, but it also helps accessibility efforts.”
