Last Tuesday, my colleague in Art History and I were making final plans about order of program for the Riess Undergraduate Art History Colloquium, which we were scheduled to host on March 28. The Riess is an annual regional opportunity for art history students (not necessarily majors) to present their work and receive feedback from a small and friendly audience, and we were excited that we'd be hosting the event for the first time.
Alas, it was not to be. No sooner had we gone home to feed our pets before meeting again for a more relaxed supper, than we received word that face-to-face courses would be going "remote" for the rest of March due to the spreading coronavirus pandemic and that events would need to be postponed or cancelled. By the end of the week, the "remote" instruction had been expanded to the remainder of the semester. It's possible we may be able to postpone the Riess until fall, but many of the students may have graduated by then and would not be available.
My university, of course, is by no means the only or even the first in the US to make this move. A growing number of colleges and universities are shifting to "remote," and soon I heard that the annual Czech and Slovak Workshop, which my alma mater the University of Pittsburgh was about to host for the first time, was also not going to occur as scheduled. Like Riess, the Workshop is all about discussion of the participants' research, except that the Workshop has historically been for advanced graduate students and early career scholars with a sprinkling of established scholars.
But events aside, what does "remote" instruction mean? Most faculty have never taught online courses and are not prepared to do so; creating an online course involves a whole lot of work above and beyond that involved in most face-to-face courses.
Expectations for "remote" instruction will vary from school to school, department to department, and course to course. My university has, fortunately, made clear that it need not mean creating the kind of online course that one might do in the normal course of things. After all, students in face-to-face courses did not sign up expecting to have an online education. Not all students have internet at home. Not all students own a computer. (These facts may amaze you, but they are facts, not fake news.) So, expecting everyone to have constant access, and bandwidth for, synchronous lectures and discussion, or what-have-you, is not realistic or fair to less-advantaged students (which means many of my own students). Sure, most students these days do have a smartphone, but I sure would not like to have to expect them to do large amounts of coursework on their phones.
I don't know what my colleagues in studio are doing beyond allowing students to work at home and in our studios (which remain open for now), but we are being allowed a good deal of latitude in figuring out alternate assignments. For now, I've asked my students to watch as many art-related films as they can and write discussion posts about them. This naturally requires some internet access, but I'm not assigning specific films. Our library is still open and so some films can be watched on VHS or DVD. Any art-related films are acceptable (although for each class I've provided a list of options pertinent to the course--good thing I'm not teaching Czech Modernism this semester!), they just need to have enough internet access to discuss what they've seen. Meanwhile, I have an exam to redo to be take-home, a paper assignment to be rewritten since the museum is closed, and so on.
Hoping the pandemic is soon over, but not feeling too optimistic about that for now.
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