Professor Barlow’s Time of Coronavirus Journal, Part V

I hope all of you are keeping up with your own journals. Remember, I will not ask to see them until you turn them in as part of your portfolios, but you will be using them as the basis for a paper next month, so don’t forget to be writing three or four times a week.

One of the things I have been considering since the shutdown of our physical campus is the future of higher education—not only in CUNY and New York City but across the country.

There are lots of people who would love to see education move more substantially online. I resist this, for I know the value of -face-to-face instruction. My father was involved with what was then called “programmed instruction” in the 1960s, the utilization of “teaching machines.” Like the others involved in this, he learned, by the 1970s, that they alone do not provide adequate access to education for most people. Rather than being at the center of education, they are most valuable when they are used along with the other tools of the educator and from a face-to-face classroom base.

I was surprised, when I announced that we would be continuing online for the rest of the semester, that so many of my students groaned. I had thought they would like the new freedom of working from home and at any time they would like. Most of you appreciate, I found, the benefits from on-campus course meetings. I shouldn’t have been surprised, though. If you had wanted to go to school online, you could have chosen to do so.

I don’t mind teaching online, but it requires a great deal more preparation than we were allowed in the shift this semester, even with the two breaks. It takes careful preparation and a different kind of syllabus—and a great deal of work on the digital platform. We were thrown into this, students and teachers, so are just having to make do. That may work for this semester, but it is not a permanent solution and, as we all know, even this semester we cannot accomplish what we should.

Colleges are planning for a drop in enrollment in the fall. I don’t if that will happen in CUNY. In fact, we may find just the opposite. After all, the economy is going to continue to be hard hit, meaning students may not have the money for expensive education but, not wanting to stop learning, may turn to CUNY, which is relatively cheap, in greater numbers. I don’t know what to expect. I am hoping that City Tech, at least, continues along approximately as it has been, not too many more students (a sudden expansion can cause problems, too) and not too many fewer. I could see enrollment going up for reasons beyond cost, too, especially in medically related fields where there is going to be increased demand for trained workers on the heels of coronavirus—but my ability to predict the future has been shown to be woefully small.

In the fall semester, we will probably start out online, migrating to the classroom, if possible, sometime later in the semester. If that happens, it will be an interesting experience, something none of us has ever been through. Normally, we meet our students and professors with little or no prior experience of them. This time, we will know a great deal about each other but will never have met. I wonder what that is going to be like.

One thing that worries me is that many professors know very little about using digital tools in teaching. It is quite different from classroom teaching and requires a new set of skills. In many ways, you have to trust your students more… not trusting simply that they won’t cheat but that they will take command of their work in a way that is not necessary when you meet regularly in the classroom. Also, there is no real online replacement for the lecture which, though many don’t like it, is an integral part of classroom teaching. Recordings and lectures through things like Zoom do not provide the same dynamic—certainly not the motivation that is one thing lectures are meant to produce.

For all of us involved in higher education, students and faculty, the next few months are going to be eye-opening. When we look back in a few years, I wonder what we will think.