Even in the best of times, life for students enrolled at Hinds Community College, in Raymond, Miss., is not easy. Many are surviving on Pell Grants and low-wage jobs at Walmart and Sonic to gain an education.
But the college offers them the prospect of a leg up. If they can graduate from one of its many career and technical programs, they might land better-paying jobs at the local tire plant or at the Nissan factory in Canton. If they earn an associate degree, they can transfer to a four-year college, like Jackson State University.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
But to do that, they have to keep studying. And that’s where Julie Clark comes in. The director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Hinds, the largest community college in the state, she has been working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, to move 800 faculty members, 9,000 students, and 3,700 course sections online.
While few colleges have the resources to effectively handle the large-scale shift to remote learning forced by Covid-19, rural, small, and cash-strapped institutions are getting by on a shoestring. The situation has meant that teaching-center directors and instructors with experience in online learning have been putting in long hours supporting their colleagues who, in turn, have had to surmount physical, technical, and emotional obstacles to reach students.
Teaching-and-learning centers have proved to be Command Central for many colleges during this transition. Their staff of educational technologists, designers, and learning specialists has helped instructors figure out how to operate Zoom, post assignments, and run discussion boards.
Yet Hinds is the only community college in Mississippi to even have a teaching-and-learning center, Clark notes. Pennsylvania State University may have 140 instructional designers to help its professors move online, but Hinds has only two, one of whom is Clark. And she’s working as fast as she can.
“We have several instructors who are really struggling. Myself and the other designer are in those courses constantly,” says Clark. “I think in their panic in trying to get things out there, they miss steps. There’s a lot of anxiety over it. They just need a lot of hand holding.”
Add to that a host of other challenges. About half of the faculty members are adjuncts, many of whom split their time among several different colleges. Some live in rural areas, where Wi-Fi is unreliable and uploading a video lecture is painfully slow. Many students don’t have internet access, so the college is trying to arrange for free Wi-Fi — or turn their buildings’ routers toward parking lots so people can study in their cars. Hinds is also trying to figure out how to teach technical programs, such as automotive and HVAC operation and commercial truck driving, virtually.
Clark’s days begin at 5 a.m., when she starts answering emails by screencasting herself working through a particular problem and sending it in her reply. Her first Zoom session is from 8 to 10 a.m., when she keeps office hours for drop-in help. Then she jumps into course design for instructors who have specific challenges, like how to teach a culinary course remotely.
She spends an hour or two in the afternoon talking to department chairs and deans, followed by another Q&A Zoom session, and, she says, “more of the same” well into the evening: course design, emergency help sessions, and so on. “I try to turn myself off at 9 o’clock to catch up with my husband,” she says.
After sending out a few more emails late in the evening, she grades her own students. Because, through it all, she’s teaching four sections of a college-orientation course, with nearly 90 students. She’s in bed by 11:30 p.m.
Clark tries her best to help the panicky instructors. But the students are the ones she worries about the most. “In the discussion forum I opened, I can sense their anxiety,” she says. “Most of them are in kind of a frenzy.”
One student has three children, all of whom are now doing school from home. She also works full time at Walmart.
Clark heard about another student — not her own — who is one of 11 kids, living with his grandmother and on food stamps. There’s no means of transportation in the household, and he has no cellphone. The college arranged to mail him his coursework.
For many students, she knows, college remains an emotional lifeline: something to hold onto as the rest of their lives get more difficult. That’s why she works as hard as she does to make sure every one of those faculty members can continue to teach as best they can. “A lot of times Mississippi gets a bad rap,” Clark notes, but it’s the kind of place where people look out for each other. And that’s what she aims to keep doing. “There are good people here,” she says.
Four states and nearly 1,400 miles away, Mays Imad is facing her own set of challenges. Like Julie Clark, she runs a teaching-and-learning center, this one at Pima Community College, which has six campuses serving 19,000 students in the Tucson metropolitan area this spring. Many are low-income, working full time as they make their way through college.
A professor of genetics, biotechnology, and bioethics, Imad feels strongly that colleges need to take stock of their students’ and instructors’ emotional health during this abrupt transition to remote learning and the economic shocks surrounding it. “I’m a neuroscientist, and I study the brain, and I struggle with: Is it ethical to teach like everything is fine? I would argue it is not.”
More than half of the students in her pathophysiology and biomedical-ethics classes have already lost their jobs. They worked at Applebees and Dunkin’ Donuts, as Uber drivers and in nursing homes. But businesses have been scaling back and shutting down as stay-at-home orders take effect.
Yet the students are in school for a reason: to build a better life. In her case, they want to get into nursing programs or transfer into four-year colleges to major in public health. “A lot of them are concerned about how they will pay their bills,” she says. “I’m trying to impart the importance of keeping going.”
Those stressors are affecting faculty members as well, she notes. “I’ve never had insomnia. All of a sudden I’m waking up at 3 or 3:30 in the morning. I don’t know what is going to happen to our students, our community, our society, the world.”
I can sense their anxiety. Most of them are in kind of a frenzy.
Because she is the only person to staff the teaching-and-learning center, Imad has been working with some faculty members who already teach online courses to hold nonstop training sessions, often well into the evening and on recorded video. They need to reach everyone, including more than 900 adjuncts, many of whom have outside jobs in industry or at places like Costco. She feels confident that they can at least manage the basics of remote instruction, since all courses at Pima are already in the learning-management system, even if they need a lot more content to be taught fully online.
But Imad tells instructors that their success this semester depends less on technology than it does on connection. To that end, she has been offering webinars to help them understand how trauma can impede students’ ability to learn, and what they can do about it. For example, she tells them, ask students how they are doing and let them know you are there for them. Or create a buddy system in which students check in with each other.
She has done the same with her own students: In her first remote class, she spent class time simply talking to students about what’s going on in their lives, as well as about the science of the brain under stress. “Right now everyone is exhausted and burned out and traumatized,” she says. “It’s important to work through that.”
Tribal colleges are experiencing a double whammy.
In addition to coping with the threats to the economy and public health that are afflicting everyone, the population served by tribal colleges has long wrestled with poverty, low levels of education, and a host of chronic health problems. Now tribal colleges face a transition to remote teaching in parts of the country where broadband and internet access are spotty at best, and where such an approach runs counter to collective strengths.
The colleges are also anchors in their communities, notes Cheryl Crazy Bull, president and chief executive of the American Indian College Fund. They’re places where students can work reliably on computers, get regular meals, connect with one another, and earn degrees in fields with shortages of workers, such as health care and education.
Twenty percent of Native American students don’t have computers or internet access at home. And about two-thirds reported being insecure about food or housing, according to a 2019 survey. “My great fear,” says Crazy Bull, “is that the crisis will halt their educational progress.”
What makes the coronavirus fallout particularly destructive, she notes, is that it is forcing people in tight-knit communities into isolation, and community-based teaching into a virtual world. Tribal elders, for example, were often brought into classrooms to teach Native languages and traditions. Nursing students learn not just the latest health-care techniques but also ceremonial and spiritual practices important to their patients.
Now students will be stuck at home — often in crowded, multigenerational households — attempting to learn with unreliable internet connections and a shared laptop. “Whenever these kinds of crisis situations occur, we fall back on traditional teaching,” Crazy Bull says. “This situation has us falling back in a way that doesn’t honor that.”
Meanwhile, instructors, many of whom are older and have limited experience with online teaching, are having to learn on the fly. Most tribal colleges are small and underresourced, and the IT person on staff is someone who is maintaining systems, not trained in instructional technology. That means that professors are having to learn how to teach online through YouTube videos and Google searches. Or they are assembling work packets to drop off at students’ houses.
More cutting-edge technologies — like virtual laboratories — are out of reach for most campuses. “If you’re Yale, you can do a simulated classroom,” says Crazy Bull. “If you’re Salish Kootenai College, in Montana, you don’t have those resources.”
As Covid-19 starts spreading into Native communities — it is already in the Navajo Nation, Lummi Nation, and Rosebud reservation — educational leaders also worry what that will mean for students and instructors who are wrestling with poor health, a lack of quality health care, and living in close quarters with extended families.
“At what point do people say, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” asks Nancy Jo Houk, chief marketing and development officer at the American Indian College Fund. “‘I can’t get food, I can’t get health care. Now I can’t log into my laptop.’ At what point do they say, ‘The odds are so against me right now, I just can’t.’ And they drop out of school?”
In eastern Kentucky, where the decline in coal mining has devastated local economies, places like Hazard Community and Technical College offer second chances. And Jennifer Lindon, its president and chief executive, is determined to keep those opportunities going — despite the challenges of teaching hands-on courses remotely and the struggles with internet access and technology in some of the poorest counties in the nation.
“We have given almost every laptop we have to students,” she says. “We’re doing a calling campaign, trying to call every single student and see what their needs are.”
Hazard has about 80 full-time faculty members and 30 adjuncts serving nearly 5,000 students. It already offers a number of degrees online, including medical information technology and criminal justice. But students enrolled in face-to-face classes don’t necessarily have what they need at home to make the jump to remote learning.
The average student is 30 years old, says Lindon, and is now trying to study as his or her kids are doing remote schoolwork. Some are training to install and repair electrical power lines as linemen — a well-paying job that offers steady employment. Or they are looking to get a commercial truck-driving license. Others are studying phlebotomy and pharmacy tech, to work in the growing health-care industry.
“We put all the content we can online,” says Lindon. “But we are concerned about those courses,” she says of those hands-on professions. Faculty members, she says, have adapted, putting their curriculum online when they can and getting creative when they can’t, such as starting Facebook groups for their classes.
My great fear is that the crisis will halt their educational progress.
“In some cases,” she says, “it’s the instructor calling each student to say, ‘OK, I need you to look at these chapters in your welding book and answer these questions. And then take a picture of it and send it to me on your phone.’”
So far, the college has shelled out about $25,000 to purchase things like headsets for instructors, and simulation-lab software for chemistry courses. It is also waiting on a back order of laptops and wireless routers that act as mobile Wi-Fi hotspots. Lindon is already planning ahead, to when the campus is back in session — whenever that may be — with long days and extended hours, and on weekends. Students will need to make up hours lost in labs or out in the field.
Most students are sticking with their programs, studying manuals, watching videos, and reading textbooks at home as best they can, says Keila Miller, dean of work-force, community, and economic development.
“Their families are depending on all these guys to get back to work,” she says. “They’ve got mortgages. They’ve got car payments. They’ve got kids in college.” Unemployment benefits are “still not going to be enough to get through all this.”
