The Next Casualty of the Coronavirus Crisis May Be the Academic Calendar

As the novel coronavirus rolled across the country in early March, Beloit College scrambled to keep up. Like virtually every other campus in the United States, it sent students home and moved instruction online. But what about the future?

“All we were doing was triage,” says Eric Boynton, provost of the small liberal-arts college in Wisconsin, remembering the days after Covid-19 hit. “I had this sinking feeling that this wasn’t enough.”

So Boynton brought an idea to a committee at Beloit that had spent nearly eight months crafting a new academic plan to differentiate itself from its peers: What if, come fall, Beloit broke the semester into 3.5-week increments, so students and professors could focus on one course at a time? That, he argued, would allow for greater flexibility to respond to what many public-health experts anticipate will be a flare-up in infections in the coming months if social-distancing orders are lifted too soon. And it would, he said, give “solidity” to the fall calendar.

The committee rejected that idea but two days later suggested another: a later start date and two seven-week modules instead of a full semester. That way, if the college needed to move everyone online either early or late in the fall, it could do so with fewer disruptions. The deal was ratified and publicly rolled out within two weeks, giving Beloit a leg up at a time when families are struggling to make sense of what the next academic year will look like.

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Beloit is one of the first colleges to lay out a new course schedule for the fall, but every institution will face the same quandary. Even if the coronavirus wanes over the summer, public-health officials say, it is likely to resurface once large groups of people — say, students in lecture halls or dormitories — begin to congregate. The solutions will depend on whether a campus is large or small, residential or commuter, mainly undergraduate or with extensive graduate programs. But all are weighing a collection of options and interlocking scenarios, each of which will force a reconsideration of bedrock assumptions about the academic calendar, and of the shape and trajectory of college life.

Should colleges split the semester into smaller parts, as Beloit did? Keep dormitories shuttered in the fall and put courses entirely online? Create hybrids so that students come to campus less frequently and convene in smaller groups? Delay the start of the semester to allow some international students to return or the virus to die down? Push the start of the fall semester to the spring of 2021? Offer fewer courses, to create a more nimble teaching environment, or explore partnerships with other institutions?

Whatever happens, it looks increasingly unlikely that the fall semester will assume traditional form. A recent survey by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers found that more than half of colleges are considering remaining fully online or are considering cutting the number of in-person courses in the fall. And 65 percent are considering increasing the number of online or remote courses (some have already made those changes).

Another, more-recent survey by the association suggests, though, that the vast majority of colleges are not yet considering altering the calendar itself. Just 21 percent of respondents using the semester system said they may delay, or have delayed, the start of the term. And fewer than 20 percent said they have added or may add sessions shorter than 16 weeks.

As they decide what to do, colleges have to factor in accreditation and other regulations, which so far have been flexible but may not remain so. State budget cuts could force public colleges to scale back course offerings. And if fall courses are taught online, students will expect instruction of much higher quality than the emergency strategies professors are employing to get through the spring term. That means colleges need to start figuring out how to redesign hundreds of courses to be taught online — assuming they think that will be necessary.

“The hard part is that no one knows what to plan for, because you have too many variables,” says Frank Dooley, senior vice provost for teaching and learning at Purdue University, where a Covid-19 task force for fall planning includes people from 12 divisions, alongside three scientific advisers.

If the typical disaster-planning scenario aims to handle tornadoes and hurricanes, “this is more like the Australian brush fires,” says Dooley. “You don’t know when it’s going to end or where it’s going next. This thing is touching everything.”

Purdue’s task force has been asked to return next week with three or four scenarios it thinks are most likely. In the meantime, Dooley and his colleagues have been mapping out what it would take to shift online a core set of courses for the fall.

At a university that offered 2,000 courses last fall, not including independent study, that’s no small task. While Purdue already offers about 200 courses online — mainly to meet general-education requirements — Dooley estimates that it will need to design 150 more courses to cover freshman year. Some 250 more courses could cover sophomores.

“My challenge then gets to be my juniors and seniors,” he says. “And so much of what they’re doing is experiential.”

On a STEM-heavy campus, he also wonders how to handle lab-based courses. Purdue has spent the last eight years integrating lectures and labs. Now, Dooley says, it will probably have to undo all that. One scenario has instructors offering the lecture part of STEM courses during the first half of the semester, possibly online, and deferring the hands-on part. But that scenario assumes Purdue will have enough capacity to cycle small groups of students through laboratories in person. Purdue is also looking into creating virtual labs that students could take online.

Dooley assumes most international students — certainly those from China — won’t show up in the fall because of logistical challenges surrounding student visas and travel. But they could still take classes remotely. That’s all the more reason, he says, to design a cohort of online courses that can be rolled out in late August.

Many colleges are wondering what accreditors and the federal government will allow this fall. So far, the Department of Education, from which accreditors seek guidance, has given colleges flexibility to cover Covid-related emergency teaching through June 1. Jamienne S. Studley, president of the WASC Senior College and University Commission, a regional accreditor for Western states, says she and other accreditors will be asking the department to extend that forbearance through the fall.

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She and others note that some specialized accreditors have struggled with lifting or altering requirements related to accruing clinical or hands-on training, such as with nursing. And unless the Education Department continues to allow Covid-related accommodations, colleges would need to seek accreditor approval if they offered more than 50 percent of a degree program online, something that could happen to shorter programs if the fall semester goes entirely online.

Still, she says, “the accreditors I’ve listened to are trying to be as responsive and as practical as possible.”

Two competing tensions are playing out now, says Bryan Alexander, a researcher and consultant who focuses on the future of higher education. On the one hand, the pandemic could be a catalyst for the kinds of “bold, persistent experimentation” needed in higher education, particularly those that could shake up entrenched ways of teaching and course delivery. On the other, people are operating in a climate of fear, panic, and diminishing budgets.

He notes, for example, that adjuncts are some of the most adaptable teachers around. “But the problem is that a lot of them are going to be gone, because that’s the easiest way for a department to save money.” Will established, tenured professors be willing to redesign their courses and perhaps move them entirely online, he wonders, especially when they may be facing pay cuts or increased workloads? “There’s a lot of micro-politics ahead,” he says.

On the macro level, Alexander wonders how colleges can position themselves in a way that makes sense to parents and students. “Is it a good move for a university to say, ‘We’re making this up as we go along. We don’t know what November is going to look like for you all’? That’s risky as hell from a marketing perspective,” he says.

Alexander and others say it may be time for more colleges to collaborate and share courses, whether informally or through a consortium, especially if they need to strip down their own offerings in the fall because of tight finances. That would require overcoming a widespread bias in academe, says Alexander, namely “if we didn’t make it, it can’t be any good.”

Russell Poulin, executive director of the Wiche Cooperative for Educational Technologies, which has members across the country, says he’s already hearing talk of such collaboration, and advocates it himself. “If you have something that’s difficult to put online, like labs, maybe you can lean on another college for a term,” he says. “You lose the tuition, but you keep the student.”

Another idea, he says, is to “backfill” some commonly taught courses by allowing students to take them from an online provider in the state, such as the University of Maryland Global Campus or Colorado State University Global.

Otherwise, he says, colleges face the prospect of having to spend the summer creating hundreds of high-quality, fully online courses for the fall, in case the pandemic is not over. That would require an enormous amount of time by instructors, plus instructional designers, technologists, and other staff members to guide them in that work. “For the vast majority of campuses,” he says, “the capacity is not there.”

When it comes to adaptability, community colleges are often ahead of the curve. Accustomed to teaching a variety of students with different interests and needs, they have been early adopters of flexible scheduling, says Karen A. Stout, president and chief executive of the nonprofit organization Achieving the Dream.

Many of her member colleges have been moving toward eight-week terms, a trend that the coronavirus is likely to accelerate, she says. Some are talking about moving the first term fully online, while others are determining, program by program, which can be taught remotely and which require hands-on work. For the latter group, Stout says, colleges are considering social-distancing methods, such as allowing only three students at a time into a welding class, spread out among 15 bays.

Community colleges also face greater challenges than do many four-year institutions, Stout notes. They enroll a high percentage of lower-income students, people who may not have reliable Wi-Fi access or laptops. And while some two-year colleges were ramping up online instruction before the pandemic, others have few resources to move online quickly. “Those colleges,” she says, “are struggling.”

By fall, community colleges may also find themselves serving a very different mix of students. “More traditional, residential college-bound students may decide to stay in the local community as a precaution,” she says. “Do we have the courses and programs at the scale we need?”

And, as a sector whose enrollment waxes as economic cycles wane, community colleges may also draw more adult students, given that so many have been laid off from service-industry jobs.

At Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, H. Jeffrey Rafn is grateful that his institution already planned to shift this summer to an eight-week term. The challenge revolves mainly around lab-based courses, which make up a good portion of the curriculum. “We teach about 400 nurses a year,” says the college’s president. “Any clinical spots are already closed up.”

For the short term, the college is rolling out a number of online simulations and video demonstrations in nursing and other skills-based courses. Starting in the fall, he says, the college will encourage new students to take more of their general-education requirements first, since those classes are more easily taught online. Still, he says, “we have a lot of students who, frankly, they want to get their hands dirty.”

In addition to gaming out which courses they could teach remotely, Rafn says, the college is considering which programs to suspend. He came out of a budget meeting last week “a combination of depressed and alarmed.” An intensive English program had already been cut, before the Covid-19 outbreak, he says. Another one, in fire-protection technologies, may also go by the wayside. “We might normally keep them,” says Rafn. “But we can’t afford those that have 5, 6, or 7 students.”

The college had hired more instructional designers to help with the shift to an eight-week term, so they will now also help with the transition to online teaching. The college also needs to think holistically, he says, about everything from providing laptops and Wi-Fi hotspots to needy students to offering advising, mental-health counseling, and other supports.

“A lot of our services are outside the classroom,” he says. “We’ve had to think about how to deliver them in a distance-learning environment. If we don’t do that, we’re going to lose a lot of students.”

Janet Simon Schreck has heard reports that some universities are considering pushing their fall semesters to the spring, but to her that makes little sense. “I don’t hear public-health experts say, ‘Just hang on until spring, and everything will be fine,’” says Schreck, associate vice provost for education at the Johns Hopkins University. “That’s also not who Hopkins is. I just don’t see us hitting pause.”

But she’s also not sure what the path forward is likely to be. As she puts it: “Who the heck knows?” Going entirely online presents an enormous challenge. So does breaking up the semester into shorter terms. Both would require significant investments to restructure courses. And, she notes, that would not solve the problems inherent in bringing thousands of students together in residence halls this fall. Add student-support services, research, graduate education, laboratory work, and regulatory issues into the mix, and things can get overwhelming.

“It’s almost like you need all of those groups thinking about the possible pros and cons,” she says, “but you can’t come up with an answer because it requires everybody thinking about the pros and cons at once.”

Hopkins has just begun the planning process for the fall, gathering stakeholders and decision makers from across the university. She is part of two groups, one thinking about undergraduate education, the other about undergraduate student life.

Hopkins is sure to go through a slower process than did Beloit, which landed within days on the idea of dividing the fall semester into two seven-week modules. Quick action was possible there, says Boynton, the provost, both because it’s a small institution and because faculty members had spent months designing a new academic program. Even though the goals of that program — offering intensive mentoring and career development to students — had nothing to do with remote learning or pandemic preparedness, the process of developing it provided Beloit with the infrastructure and relationships it needed to act quickly.

“No matter how fast you have to move,” he says, “I just don’t think this can be a top-down decision.” So far, the response has been positive, from current and future students as well as alumni.

“At this moment of uncertainty,” says Boynton, “change seems normal.”