Mostly-barren hallways, masked students and professors, and large classrooms with just a handful of students to promote physical distancing — this will likely be the scene on post-secondary campuses this fall.
Sudbury.com reached out to the city’s three post-secondary institutions — Laurentian University, Collège Boréal and Cambrian College — to see what the fall semester will look like.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Laurentian University, like many other universities in Canada, has announced plans to deliver the majority of its courses through remote teaching come September.
But it also plans to deliver as many courses as safely possible with face-to-face teaching next fall.
Laurentian announced May 28 it has signed a memorandum of understanding on the issue with the Laurentian University Faculty Association (LUFA), detailing the specific modalities and working conditions for professors.
The university’s Senate is meeting today (June 1) to approve the plan for the fall semester and full-year courses starting in September.
Professors are in the process of requesting in-person classes or remote delivery for their courses, said Serge Demers, Laurentian’s interim vice-president, academic and provost.
Those requests will then be vetted by the deans and the university’s joint health and safety committee, he said.
Demers said he doesn’t yet know what percentage of the university’s classes will be delivered remotely or in-person.
Laurentian’s top priority is keeping its employees and students safe, he said.
“We are not going to put people in an unsafe position,” said Demers. “That’s one of the reasons why our joint health and safety committee is involved.”
That may mean putting a class of 50 students in a hall meant to house 300.
Demers said there will also definitely be a need for personal protective equipment (PPE) but it is yet to be determined whether PPE would be provided by the university or by professors and students themselves.
“That’s something that we need to work on as this crystallizes itself,” he said.
He said most of the in-person classes at Laurentian this fall will likely be in the fields of health or science — for example, nursing or midwifery students who need hand-on experience in procedures such as taking blood pressure or inserting needles.
“I would not expect a lot of submissions for face-to-face from our faculty of arts, for example,” Demers said.
As for the quality of education when most classes are going to be delivered remotely, Demers said Laurentian’s professors learned from their experience in March and April, when classes were suddenly moved online due to the pandemic.
“My impression is that we’re now in a far better position than we were, and faculty members will have the better part of three months to prepare for that different mode of operation,” he said,
Still, learning on your computer doesn’t provide the same experience for students, and Demers said some students may decide to skip next semester because they want to learn on campus. Others may not be able to afford tuition because the pandemic has affected their employment prospects.
Laurentian doesn’t yet know what its enrolment next fall will be, but Demers said its safe to say the situation is financially impacting the post-secondary sector in general.
As for Sudbury’s two colleges, a spokesperson for Collège Boréal said in an email it’s still in the process of finalizing its plan for fall classes.
“We are working on finding the most balanced approach to deliver our different programs safely and adequately,” the email said. “The plan will also reflect the specificities of our seven campuses across the province.”
Cambrian College said it is taking a phased-in approach to re-opening the institution to students.
Paula Gouveia, the school’s vice-president academic, said there isn’t a strict timeline to how the phases will play out. A reopening plan published by Cambrian states the plan “will be informed by the ongoing and evidence-based assessment of public health officials.”
Cambrian has broken the process down into five phases:
- Phase 0 (the current phase) aims to reduce the spread of the disease, which was achieved by closing the campus and transitioning to remote teaching and learning;
- Phase 1 maintains the measures to limit spread and prioritizes the delivery of programs;
- Phase 2 begins to reopen the campus slowly, with controlled access, some hands-on learning while maintaining physical distancing, but common areas remain closed;
- Phase 3 will see a broader reopening of the campus, with controlled access maintained, but with limited access to student services and campus events for students;
- Phase 4 will see the campus fully reopen, with a return to in-class delivery of courses (under a new “blended model”), a return to hands-on learning, the reopening of campus amenities like the Fitness Centre and the return of business travel, and;
- Phase 5 is what’s being called a return to a “new normal” where services and work that can be done remotely in a way that makes sense will continue in that fashion, while all other “normal” campus activities resume.
And with an anticipated second wave of COVID-19 expected to hit sometime in the fall, the phased-in approach and the increase in remote delivery of classes and services means Cambrian will be able to manage that second wave in a more prepared and streamlined way.
“The stress on remote delivery means we won’t need to pivot so sharply,” Gouveia said.
Services that can be delivered remotely include virtual tutoring, access to an e-library to promote more physical distancing and possibly limiting the cafeteria to take-out only.
What the “new normal” will be is still under discussion among faculty and staff, she said.
“There so much debate around the ‘new normal,’ conversations about what’s the best way to deliver learning,” Gouveia said. “There may be things we want to maintain or accelerate.”
A refrain that has been repeated by other institutions, including the City of Greater Sudbury, is that the pandemic forced organizations to change how they do what they do. Post-secondary institutions are no different.
As Gouveia explained, businesses, governments, schools and other institutions could be finding methods of service delivery used during the pandemic that make sense to adopt as the standard practice going forward.
-With files from Heidi Ulrichsen and Mark Gentili
